Cinema of Conflict: Four Films by Krzysztof Kieślowski

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I missed out buying this when it came out and had to track down a copy on eBay. So until last night I had never gotten around to watching pre-Decalogue Kieslowski… shamefully.

Camera Buff is where I started. I didn’t see a discussion of this film anywhere on the forum, so I’d like to throw out a few observations and elicit some thoughts from fans of this work. I liked the film, but did not love it. It felt very uneven to me, so I’m eager to hear defenses. I found Filip to be such a mercurial figure. I didn’t know how to read his behavior and it didn’t help that reactions from others (his wife and co-workers etc.) differed so drastically. He seemed to me to be a very uninteresting naive and foolish person, shallow and self-centered, not at all sympathetic, though not repulsive. We see such a range of emotions, through casual indifference to his wife to profound joy at the birth of his daughter to obsessive zaniness in his initial filing project. I found him impossible to take seriously. And that seemed to me to be the point. So when his film gets third prize at the festival, it’s hardly an endorsement of the seriousness of his work, followed as it is by the TV producer’s honest pronouncement that all the films are bad. Filip seems inspired to make more authentic art, but there’s little indication he succeeds. Instead we see him just become more self-centered. What seemed like an overreaction by his wife to the time he spent on his new hobby early in the film turns out to be a proleptic response to what he ends up doing, which is basically abandoning her. The actress playing this role is wonderful but the role is poorly or underwritten. Why does she overreact early on? The full motivations of her actions remain obscure. But by the end, when Filip turns the camera on himself, it seems at once to be a true realization of what will make him a good filmmaker and at the same an intensification of his myopic condition. He can only see himself. If Camera Buff is the implied product of this moment at the film’s end, is its self-centeredness offset by starting it with a shot that recreates his wife’s nightmare?

Formally the film is masterful. Down to editing and camerawork. But the writing made it hard for me to care about the characters, especially Filip. In his interview, the scholar Oleszczyk suggests he is a deeply empathetic character. Why then was I left cold? (Apologies for the desultory writing… I’m sitting in the waiting room at the mechanic.)

[MichaelB]

Michał Oleszczyk and I discussed Camera Buff in detail in this 47-minute podcast, which was recorded in Kieślowski's old family home in Sokołowsko, Poland (now the Kieślowski Archives).

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Will listen soon, thanks Michael!