 |
|
List Price: $29.95 |
|
Publisher: New Yorker Films
Salesrank: 77692
Released: 2004-08-17
Theatrical-Release: 1979
|
| Our Price: $26.99 |
|
|
|
Availibility: 1
Costumer Rating:  |
Customer Reviews:
The story of a man making stories with films 
“Camera Buff” (Amator) is an early work of Krzysztof Kieslowski, but one that shows he already exhibits talent as a master of drama. The story is about a young man (as played by Jerzy Stuhr) who is happy. He has a loving wife, a newborn baby, and a nice home. He gets an 8 mm video camera to record his daughter growing up, but it turns into a hobby with a life of its own. As he grows more successful in his endeavors, his wife becomes jealous. Although the story is straightforward, it is one that really draws you in and gets interesting right away.
As we watch the story of a man making stories with films, we can almost see that it is like playing god, but not one that is all-powerful. Ironically, all too often in life just as everything is going well in one area, something else falls apart. I think part of the appeal of the film has to due with the fact that we can relate with at least some of the messages. It doesn’t portray life in some glamorized way, and I think the viewers can appreciate that.
“Amator” has that Kieslowski feeling to it and is a great film. I found the story to be unpredictable enough to keep me guessing, so it was thoroughly entertaining with its great acting and storyline. I highly recommend it to anyone that likes dramas, as this 1979 Kieslowski film is sure to delight them.
Fully developed
“Camera Buff” (1979) brought Krzysztof Kieslowski his first international acclaim, taking the top prize at the Moscow film fest. It concerns a proud dad (Jerzy Stuhr) who buys an 8mm camera with which to film his newborn. The factory worker becomes obsessed with film, losing his old life to his new calling. When his wife announces she is leaving, the camera buff only can frame her departing figure with his fingers. Action! Some elements came from Kieslowski’s life as a film student, his biographer Annette Insdorf reports in a brief but informative interview in the extras. The color images (full frame, enhanced) and sound are adequate. Subtitles are clear. This is one of four recent additions to Kino’s Kieslowski collection — along with “No End,” “The Scar” and “Blind Chance” — all of which show that the Polish master’s writing and directing skills arrived almost fully formed when he turned to feature films. Each of the films benefits from a powerful central performance. They are products of the 1970s and ’80s, a time of vast sociopolitical changes in Poland, but are not timepieces or attacks on the communists. Highly recommended.
QUIXOTIC OBSESSIONS
For the late Krzysztof Kieslowski, celebrated director of RED, WHITE, and BLUE, life is an undivine comedy–and film-making a far stranger farce. No doubt that the absurdities that this Pole faced througout his life afforded him a peculiar brand and blend of pessimism, humanism, and humour which informs his works.In CAMERA BUFF, originally entitled AMATOR in Polish with the implication on the word amateur, the film-maker is Filip, a factory worker. He acquiresan 8 mm camera with the intention of filming his daughter’s development. This biographic projects soon develops into other things, such as bearing witness to the society around him. It comes to a point where the authorities cautions him in his filmic projects. Filip’s double life takes over and he is slowly becomes isolated from his family and friends. In the end Filip finally faces up to his obsessions. What began as a humourous movie about obsessive cinephilia turns and, later, totalitarian film-making, doubles back into a study of human vulnerablity. Filip’s final gesture is revisited by Kieslowski, the man behind the camera, in a scene towards the end of of his last movie RED. The autobiographical is not far away from Kieslowski’s meditation on politics and art. Kieslowski started out as a documentarist. Once, it turns out that he may have recorded a murderer stuffing her victim’s dead body in a train locker. When the authorities seized the cameras for his documentary, it turns out that the event was not filmed. In addition, Kieslowski offers fragments of a documentary in CAMERA BUFF. This documentary within the movie was once a potential project but was turned down by the censors. Kieslowski not only relates to his characters, the ‘not fulfilled’ as one commentator puts it, but may be populated by his echoes, shades or twins. Actual incidents and personages intrude upon the fictional world. Stories get repeated with slight variations. Lives are lived simultaneously in different parts of the world. Some are born too soon or too late, depending upons one’s point of view, but all are after the same things in life.Kieslowski is a moralist film-maker andhe eschews a heavy-handed moralism for a compassionate world view. No one is entirely evil and we must understand them, he would suggest. And so his characters may seem lost and clueless, but in the end Kieslowski offers them a sense of ambigious redemption and release. Their lives and ours are part of a human comedy afterall.
