Saturday, December 23, 2006

Camera Buff



Amator (1979)
IMDB
My Rate: 4/5
Directed by: Krzysztof Kieslowski


Who told TV is shit?! ;) It's good for a couple of hours in a week. Let's be positive!

Filip Moscz, a family guy and a low rank clerk in communist Poland buys a Russian mechanical portable camera to record the birth and growth of his first child. He gradually finds a lot of interest in himself about recording the life and making films about it. His boss asks him to film a business event in his company. This film introduces him to a film festival, and that spreads a new horizon of life before him. His "artist life" begins: new people with artistic figures, girls, fame, money, reputation (all not in the hollywood style!), smoking, losing his wife because of his negligence.

[spoiler]
In his social life, his documentary style makes his boss, the supporter of his film club, nervous and that leads to firing Filip's friend responsible for the cultural issues of the company. Filip gets ruined and destroys his latest work which was to be sent to TV for screening.

The last scene is a master work. He turns the camera back to himself, in a close-up, shocked and cautious, starts to review what had happened since the birth of his daughter.
[/spoiler]

This is the kind of films with a simple story and very familiar un-judgeable situations. You have your wife and child in one side, and you have a brilliant new creative idea that can make your life very much more joyful. What if your wife doesn't give a shit about that idea? What if the idea makes everything go to the dogs? What if it's not a creation but a momentary temptation? How can you distinguish these two?

They are not distinguishable, I'm afraid. Art is a temptation to create. Once you find that you can create something, you can do it or kill the idea and: "Go to the farms right now. Hoe the land, and keep your mind in a close circle!"

That's it. Pay the price. If you want to be the artist type pay the price for it Mr Moscz and "see how deep down the rabbit hole goes".



3 comments:

H.B. said...

At 70s, the movies made in the east out of the circle of government were always have something to say. as we have such an atmosphere in Iran, we get their ideas too soon.
I remembered a movie from Poland, A young man working as a employee in university was fond of math. The Movie affected me very much when I was youth. I can not remember the name :(

H.B. said...

Alexandra! Thank you but It is not the movie I mentioned, if your post is related to mine.

Gog said...

I have also recently seen this movie and, yes it's a good one.

Among the films that Kieslowski shot in Poland, there's a few with much more interesting topics, but this one has some other advantages. Each and every Kieslowski's film include incredibly well "designed" (or written) characters, and an amazing depth both in the message and the way it is told. This film has some extraordinary ideas that are shown or insinuated: I liked the fact that everybody wanted to be filmed (which is used to show the scene in which the neighbour cries his mother, who had died), or the simple (but interesting) scenes that Filip films (the doves, the films in the factory, the works in the street), and the atmosphere in that factory cinema festival/contest.