Camera Buff Poster

Camera Buff (1979)

Comedy | Romance 
Rayting:   7.9/10 6.5K votes
Country: Poland
Language: Polish
Release date: 14 February 1980

Filip buys an eight millimetre movie camera when his first child is born. Because it's the first camera in town, he's named official photographer by the local Party boss. His horizons widen...

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kurohuj 23 December 2004

One of the most ambitious early works of Kieslowski, AMATOR, or CAMERABUFF is a great work, sadly not too well know by the world. I accidentally stumbled upon this film at my local video store, and noticed that Jerzy Stuhr was on the cover (the lead role). i have always liked Stuhr's acting, so i decided to pick it up. i also noticed that this was a film by K. Kieslowski, giving me even more reason to take this film out. after popping this movie into the VCR, the first thing that caught my eye was the beautiful, yet fore-shadowing, close-up, sun lit shot of the the bird (a recurring camera technique used by Kieslowski). the film was shot in a very minimalistic, and the narrative was very involving. Fascinatingly enough, the film starts out at a "high point", where all the characters seem at peace and ease, and then plunges down to a miserable low. the feeling at the end of the movie is in-describable... i recommend this Krzysztof Kieslowski film anyone really interested in his work. it was a very good early piece.

FilmCriticLalitRao 2 July 2007

Fmovies: To an ordinary viewer "Amator" is a film about film-making.However I feel that this is only partially true as this film is much more than a film within a film.Amator is a wonderful film about the role cinema plays in human life along with basic emotions like joy, sorrow, suffering, humiliation, friendship, death etc. Much of the film's brilliance comes in the form of incredible acting performance by Jerzy Stuhr.He has given a masterful twist to his character named Filip Mosz. In "Amator",he knows fully well that he is suffering enormously due to the lack of creative freedom but despite this knowledge he resolutely decides to confront all his emotional crisis. There is no artistic freedom for him as his party officials do not allow him to make the films which he truly wants to make. His wife is against his film-making activities too. This takes toll on their domestic bliss too. In a broad perspective "Amator" talks of the difficulties most of the filmmakers Eastern Europe had to face when they were living under communist times.In " Amator", Kieslowski has shown how subtle films like this one can be made which are mildly critical of party. It would be of great interest to viewers conscious of the honest cinema movement called "cinema of the moral concern". For others it would be a good introduction to one of the outstanding films of East European cinema.

MartinHafer 14 February 2006

I really liked this film because it dared to be different and it was an excellent study of psychology. This movie was about a Polish man who scraped together his money in order to by an 8mm camera to film his new baby. However, shortly after getting the camera and beginning filming his wife and child, he gets really hooked on making his little films--and seems to film almost everything around him. At first, it's fun, but then it becomes an obsession. In the process, instead of LIVING and EXPERIENCING life with his little family, he is filming them in a very detached way. However, he is so into the filming that he hardly recognizes his wife's growing anger over that ^&@#*^@! camera! Then, when his boss sees him filming and asks him to make a film for the company, his problem grows by leaps and bounds. He seems to see himself as the next great documentary maker and begins to enter competitions and send his films to the television network. To his wife's chagrin, he receives positive reviews and by this point she's lost him--they have no real life together. Where the film goes from there I will leave for you to watch. It is a fascinating psychological study of a man and his obsession--as well as the impact this ultimately has on others around him. An excellent film.

Painbow 20 June 2008

Camera Buff fmovies. I think there are only two truly great films about film making. One is Fellini's "eight and a half" and the other is this. We witness the transformation of a man from factory worker into artist. All achieved through the use of his camera and more specifically, the things he sees through the camera's lens. Kieslowski is clearly telling a story close to his heart here and shows the audience both the joy and freedom art can bring but also more tellingly, the obsession that can overtake ones life.

The performances are great and the film, in my opinion, is given further impact due to the political undertones that are unavoidable.

Kieslowski even seems to be condoning censorship by pointing out that when it occurs, it forces film makers to find ways around it and produce superior work as a consequence.

Not a perfect film by far but a film that points the way to a career that would continue to rise

paul2001sw-1 6 November 2004

Krzyszof Kieslowksi begun his career as a documentary film-maker. From the start, he seemed to know two things: that in the shabby, feudal bureaucracy that was communist Poland, everything was political; and that the camera is never truly neutral. It was the second concern that saw him shift into telling fictional, constructed stories; while the first, and his own struggles as a young director, inspired the subject of 'Camera Buff', his first feature. As well as its immediate subject, the film is also a fascinating portrayal of an unfashionable subject, namely the class system, alive and well in the supposed socialist utopia (Kieslowski was a great admirer of Ken Loach, so perhaps we should not be too surprised). The film starts as a black comedy in the manner of the tenth part of his later 'Dekalog', and is both very funny and immediately true to life; as it progresses, it becomes more serious but there isn't quite the emotional intensity that marks his greatest works. The score is also less remarkable than those in the films he made with Zbigniew Priesner, his permanent collaborator from the mid 1980s. But his skill at composing images that are simultaneously profoundly ordinary and starkly arresting is very much in evidence, as is the characteristic sense of an all-pervasive greyness in the lives of his characters, punctured only by shafts of colour when his hapless hero comes into contact with the affluent metropolitan elite. In Dennis Potter's 'The Singing Detective', a central theme is the way that the artist will stop at nothing in using their own life as material, and this is also a theme here, growing in importance as the movie progresses. It's an unusual subject for a debut, and can perhaps be seen as Kieslowski laying his cards on the table before he begun the game. Greatness lay just around the corner.

ellkew 17 May 2008

I found this film enthralling and revealing about a man gradually discovering his purpose in life and the effect it has on those around him as well as the obstacles he now has to face. He must now face the political as he takes a stance on social issues in his life and his town. His naiveté is warming and it demonstrates what a great actor Stuhr is that the film chips away at this slowly as he awakens to the new realities of his life. From a man who had everything at the beginning he has now shattered his domestic life but gained something some would say far richer and more permanent for his soul, a purpose. One that helps him to 'understand what this shitty life is about'. The final shot brings the film full circle as we see a man in the grip of his obsession.

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