Il cineamatore

A Model of the Man as a Young Artist

One of the best things in the world is to take someone you love deeply and trace them back in their histories, back back before you knew them. Back until you see all the butterflies that nudged each other to produce what you need and feed.

And before the shape was mature. Yes, then you can see the structure, the limbs before they flowered and even surprise yourself a bit.

I'm in love with Kieslowski. Oh he isn't my favorite filmmaker, and not the one I spend time with when I need to learn and grow. But he is someone to have tea with, a friend who has his own way of fluffing air with apparent lovely slight fogs but when you encounter them you find them informed, nourishing, psychotropic. More than lovely. "Heaven," though not all his, is something I wish on every soul and every vehicle he had driven until then carried him there.

This is Kielsowski's first feature. It was before he entered into that odd writing partnership where some external force (Piesiewicz) created some sort of conventional frame on which our artistlover could drape his folds, lace and knives. Before that clever partnership that hid the mechanics.

Here you can see his favored machine, the simple fold: a movie about movie-making and love, and all the related dimensions he knew at the time: intellectual, death, rutting, wistfulness, justice. Passions all. Urges all. At the end, it loops upon itself, the ladder complete to start again at the beginning of the next.

It isn't particularly profound or satisfying by itself. But if you are a lucid mind today, chances are you think about narrative flows and how you and the world use them to wind around and buffet each other. And almost certainly you have had tea with Kieslowski.

If so, you'll find this model of his younger self will tell you something about yourself in an odd, indirectly magical way. If you do, check out the trigger for passion here: Chopin.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

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.

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.

Jerzy Stuhr buys an 8mm film camera to film his newborn daughter. The manager of the plant he works at hears about it, and tells him to shoot a film about the plant's 25th anniversary. Stuhr figures out the basics of editing, but the director suggests changes he doesn't like. Ignoring this, he takes the film to an amateur festival and wins a prize. As his obsession with film grows, his wife, Malgorzata Zabkowska, suffers postpartum depression, exacerbated by the realization that the things he had once wanted -- her, a daughter, a quiet life -- are no longer his goals.

Krzysztof Kieslowski's third feature is a meditation on the power of film and the inability of a finite work of art to accurately reflect the infinite world, or even the myriad complications of a small town. As Stuhr's skills and connections grow, he comes to see everything through an imaginary camera lens, not seeing anything outside his self-imposed frame. Beautifully shot by five cameramen, dialogue by Stuhr, make this a fine journey of self-discovery.

An innocent enough decision. Filip (Jerzy Stuhr) buys a camera to film his new daughter. It costs two months salary and it makes him a celebrity of sorts as he is the only one in town that has one.

Now, his boss wants him to film the 25th anniversary celebration of the company. He really gets into filming and soon runs headlong into "rules." Of course, you have rules in a communist country. His wife is not too excited about his new hobby, but he soon gets his film entered into a film festival.

Soon, like all who truly love film, Filip is attending screenings, talking to directors, and reading film magazines to improve his craft. But, more and more his wife is displeased, and his boss is cooling to the idea as he moves from filming the company to social statements.

His desire for tranquility gives way to a desire for fame and art at the cost of his wife and family.

He also discovers the unintended consequences of reporting the truth. In the end he turns the camera on himself as he realizes he had everything in the beginning and lost it all.

A fascinating look at real cinema and finding what you want.