The Collapse of an 8mm Amateur: Krzysztof Kieslowski's CAMERA BUFF (1979)

More than a decade before he mesmerized audiences with masterful works like The Decalogue (1988), The Double Life of Veronique (1991) and the Three Colors Trilogy (1993-1994), Polish born filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski had mainly worked in the field of documentary shorts. While some of these shorts had been fictional works, it as a documentary filmmaker that Kieslowski had initially made his name, throughout his first full decade, as a director in the seventies.  
Camera Buff (also known as Amateur) was not Kieslowski’s first feature-length narrative film (he had previously shot both The Scar and The Calm in 1976) but it was his first truly accomplished fictional work. Like his later more well-known works, including Blue (1993) and Red (1994), Camera Buff shows Kieslowski as a supremely gifted artist and storyteller and it remains a sometimes dazzling, if mostly subdued, opening chapter to one of the most important film careers of the modern era.
 Relatively successful middle-class factory worker Filip Mosz and his wife have recently welcomed a newborn baby into their lives. Filip buys an 8mm film camera with the hopes of capturing his new child in the early stages of its life. What he thought would be an innocent hobby turns serious when his boss asks Filip to begin using the camera to film his company’s board meetings. Soon Filip has a film crew at his disposal and his once happy life is altered as he becomes more and more obsessed with the idea of capturing what is real, even if it means putting his marriage and career in jeopardy.
Camera Buff is a significant film in not only Kieslowski’s career but also Polish film in general, as it manages to be not only a truly transcendent personal work but also a pointed political one, as it carefully criticizes the cloud of censorship that had hung over Kieslowski’s generation. Kieslowski shows the process for a young filmmaker to be a difficult one, as personal visions were often subjected unfairly to an outside authoritative hand.
Camera Buff is, at its core, an extremely serious film but it contains the particular kind of wit and warmth that seems specific to certain Kieslowski works, like the often-undervalued White (1993). Few directors have ever come close to matching Kieslowski’s ability to get inside the spirit of a soul in transition and Filip, like Kieslowski’s greatest characters, is very much a man in crisis but by the film’s final frames, in which he bravely turns the camera on himself, he has had a very valuable and necessary spiritual breakthrough.
While it lacks the refinement of Kieslowski’s later films, Camera Buff is a beautifully composed work that shows the influential filmmaker stepping away from the grittiness of his early documentary style and into a more polished cinematic technique.

 Camera Buff is ultimately about a man’s growth as a filmmaker and one can easily draw a parallel to Kieslowski’s own strides at the time. Camera Buff might be a transitional piece in Kieslowski’s career, but it is an undeniably important one. Camera Buff wouldn’t completely solidify Kieslowski as one of the great filmmakers of his generation but it served as fair enough warning that, even at this early stage, he had qualities that few of his peers could match. While nowhere near as perfect as his triumphant run of final films, Camera Buff is a wonderfully rendered and moving work that acts as not only a meditation on the human condition but also cinema itself.

 -Jeremy Richey, a rejected Directory of World Cinema piece from a few years back revised in 2014-

Intellect's Directory of World Cinema: East Europe

The East Europe volume of Intellect's Directory of World Cinema is now available to order over at Amazon and Amazon UK. I have a number of pieces in this new volume including my reviews of Vera Chytilová's Daisies (1966), Dusan Makavejev's WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971), Walerian Borowczyk's Blanche (1972), and Milos Forman's Loves of a Blonde (1965). I also have two longer articles in the book on the careers of Krzysztof Kieslowski and Walerian Borowczyk. The book also features my tope-five list of personal favorite Eastern European films for those interested.

It's a great looking volume and I am proud to have some of my work (especially my pieces on Borowczyk) featured, especially in that it gives me the opportunity to be in the same volume with one of my favorite writers, Daniel Bird. Thanks to those who might order a copy and I hope you enjoy the book.

I will next be appearing in Volume 2 of the American Independent edition, which is scheduled to street later this year.

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Kieslowski's Three Colors Trilogy Hits Criterion Blu This Week!

Krzysztof Kieślowski's legendary Three Colors Trilogy is hitting Blu-ray this week via a new box-set from The Criterion Collection. While most of the extras seem ported over from the old Miramax box, there are some new goodies for fans of this astonishing trilogy to savor. The most important thing though is that these are Brand-New high-definition digital restorations and you can bet that Criterion's set will have these oh-so-special films looking better than ever.
Blue, White and Red are, simply put, three of cinema's greatest works and I am sure this new set from Criterion will prove to be the definitive one. Don't miss it...

Operation Screenshot (Films of the Sixties) Krzysztof Kieslowski's Tramway (1966)

The Art of the Movie Poster: Kieślowski's Camera Buff (1979)

Krzysztof Kieślowski would have turned seventy years old today...

Behind the Scenes With My Favorite Actors: Irène Jacob in The Double Life of Véronique

"I have a strange feeling. I feel like I'm not alone. Like I'm not alone in the world."





















***Stills taken from the excellent Criterion Collection DVD***

Warm Birthday Wishes For Irene Jacob

Today is Irene Jacob's 42nd Birthday and Moon In The Gutter would like to extend a happy birthday wish to her, as well as thank her for her performances in Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique and Red. I can't even began to describe how much these two performances have meant to me and I wish Irene all the best on this special day.

A Personal Look At Kieslowski's Decalogue Part One

It has been twenty years since Krzysztof Piesiewicz and Krzysztof Kieslowski began seriously putting together their ambitious and monumental 10 part DECALOGUE series for Polish television in late 1988. Each episode, directed by the late Kieslowski, was based loosely on one of the Ten Commandments and they all represent cinema at its finest and most complex. To celebrate its upcoming twentieth anniversary, I am revisiting every episode and will be posting some personal thoughts on each as I re-watch them. For more scholarly, well written and thought out approaches to the great Kieslowski's work may I recommend both KIESLOWSKI ON KIESLOWSI from Faber and Faber, and Annette Insdorf's magnificent DOUBLE LIVES, SECOND CHANCES from Hyperion.

All of these personal posts are dedicated to Krzysztof Kieslowski and Irene Jacob.

***Spoilers Follow***

DECALOGUE 1 is one of my personal favorites of all of Kieslowski's works. It tells the relatively simple story of a son and a father and their reliance on a home computer. It is in the dead of a harsh Polish winter and the father, who has renounced God, believes the computer to carry all of life's answers, including measuring the density of the ice where his son skates. After assuring his son one day that the ice is safe to navigate, an odd unexplainable thaw happens and the boy drowns.
I'm not sure what it is that I respond to so much with this first part of DECALOGUE. I suppose it could be a lot of things: my own personal faith and beliefs, my distrust of technology, or perhaps I just connect to the sense of paternal betrayal that is inherent in it. While we most certainly feel for the father in this episode, we also recognize him as a bit of a fool who places all of his faith in the wrong place and it literally causes his son to lose his life.
I have often wondered what first time viewers thought of this opening for DECALOGUE. Sparked by the beautiful and sad score by Zbigniew Preisner and the icy cinematography by Wieslaw Zdort (which is so cold it feels like it could crack your TV screen down the middle), Kieslowski's DECALOGUE 1 is one of the most heartbreaking things he ever committed to celluloid. Despite its brilliance, it is harder to think of a more ominous and demanding opening for a ten part series.
Anyone who has ever questioned Kieslowski's artistry should watch DECALOGUE 1, as his mastery of the medium is resoundingly apparent. From the opening shot of a barren frozen lake and the image of a lonely stranger (who pops up in several episodes never explained), Kieslowski's images freeze themselves onto the viewers brain and he never lets up. His cinema is literally the way many of the early creators probably envisioned it but could never quite get to. Stanley Kubrick himself called DECALOGUE the great masterpiece of our time, and I am not sure how far off the great master was when he said that.
Perhaps the first DECALOGUE's most startling moment comes when a simple ink blot seems to strangely foreshadow the young sons death. It is a virtuoso moment for Kieslowski as a filmmaker and the only reference point I can think of for it is a similarly striking moment in Nicolas Roeg's DON'T LOOK NOW, a film that also included the tragic drowning of a child.
Outside of immediately announcing Kieslowski at the top of his game after two decades of projects that grew more interesting with each new work, DECALOGUE 1 also set the tone of the series with a group of phenomenally gifted Polish actors doing some of the best work of their lives. Heartbreaking in his conviction that technology has all of life's answers is Henryk Baranowski as the father Krzysztof (one has to take note of his name here). This was astonishingly enough one of the first and only roles for the obviously talented Baranowski, who plays this part with an undercurrent of raw emotion and finally a heartbreaking doubt. Equally compelling is young Wojciech Klata as the son Pawel, who is questioning everything but not getting any clear answers, because finally there aren't any.

As I already mentioned, the behind the scenes work is also top of the line with special note going again to the photography of Zdort and the music of Preisner. Presiner especially would continue to play a massively important role right through the rest of the great director's career. His work on DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE and the THREE COLORS films is already legendary among many film fans and it will only grow in stature.
DECALOGUE was a ghost to me for quite a while. Like many Americans I fell in love with Kieslowski's cinema when I saw THREE COLORS: BLUE in 1993 during its initial American theatrical showing. The Chicago screening I saw was packed and everyone in the room seemed to have the same slightly dazed,awed and completely blown away look as they were leaving the theater. I then started to backtrack, first with a VHS copy of DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE and finally some of his earlier films. DECALOGUE was near impossible to find in this period here in the States and my first viewing came in the mid nineties courtesy of a blurry grey market VHS that was probably the worst way to see it, but Kieslowski's artistry and intelligence made even the worst VHS copy glisten.

It was a joyous thing to finally get Facets first DVD release of it in the late nineties and even a bigger one when the remastered special edition of it came out several years ago. Whatever version you can track down, THE DECALOGUE is a must see for film fans everywhere. I have watched the whole thing through at least half a dozen times over and am still discovering new moments in each viewing that cement Kieslowski as perhaps the major filmmaker of the past thirty years.

I will be sharing more thoughts on the remaining nine episodes of DECALOGUE through the rest of the year. If you haven't experienced it before, give it a look...or if it has been a while, maybe a re-visit is in order to celebrate its upcoming twentieth.

Artist and Muse #1

Krzysztof Kieslowski and Irene Jacob at The 1994 Cannes Film Festival for Trois Couleus-Rouge.

I Want You (You Don't Get Well No More)

Sundance is showing Michael Winterbottom's, increasingly most difficult film to see, I Want You this month. Winterbottom is a hard director to nail down, since his twisted 1995 road film Butterfly Kiss he has worked in several genres and released everything from the period film Jude to the improvised digitally shot 9 Songs.
His films, regardless of their stylistic differences, almost always feature characters engaged in an obsessive and dangerous love. Winterbottom's films share this obsessive nature with one of his idols, Fassbinder, and while his films might seem as different as night and day it's this obsessive interest in people relating to each other that sparks all of his work.
I Want You was released in 1998 to mixed reviews and apparently had distribution problems from the get go. It's history in the States has been very problematic, after being granted a surprising R Rating (more on that later) it had a brief theatrical run followed by a VHS release that quickly slipped out of print. It has become available in Europe on DVD but has never found it's way to that format here.
Used video copies fetch high prices on ebay, so Sundance is doing a service to people who have been hoping to see it.
The version currently running on Sundance is apparently uncut, with it's graphic sexuality intact. It is unfortunately full screen and Winterbottom's 2.35 compositions' suffer from this. The opening credits play widescreen before switching to the full-screen ratio, a frustrating occurrence that took me back in time to old VHS releases.
Winterbottom, and screenwriter Eoin McNamee, apparently got the idea for his film from Elvis Costello's classic obsessive track I Want You off his album with the Attractions Blood and Chocolate. The song is played throughout the film and plays an important role at one point to the plot. The song is rightly considered one of Costello's finest as well as darkest. It matches the film's dark worldview and increasingly oppressive nature perfectly. The film's bright opening expansive outdoor shots viewed from a train soon begin to sink into more foreboding and darker interiors as it progresses.
I Want You features the talented Rachel Weisz in one of her first starring roles. Her character Helen is the object of three obsessive characters. Helen is also hiding something which gives the film a final act twist that isn't entirely satisfying but work's due to Weisz's greatly nuanced performance.
The film also features a young Alessandro Nivola as the mysterious Martin whose character is revealed more fully as the film progresses. Much like the song it's based on, the film reveals more and more clues as it progresses. It short running time of 87 minutes is as deceptive as the main characters as this an exhausting, but rewarding, film to watch.
The strongest aspect of the film, along with Weisz, is the cinematography by Slawomir Idziak. Winterbottom was obviously inspired by Idziak's great work for Kieslowski and I Want You is visually a feast of color. This is especially evident in the earlier brighter scenes of yellow and gold that play such a crucial contrast with the later dark blues and greys of Martins and Helen's homes. Weisz's underwater swimming scenes throughout the film also clearly invoke Binoche swimming in Blue. Both films use the pool and Idziak's color scene to reflect internally what is happening with the characters. The pool, as in Blue, also becomes an invaded sanctuary. Kieslowskis extraordinary shot of Binoche surrounded by diving children as she is attempting to deal and escape from the death of her own family is mirrored here stylistically by the nude Helen attempting to sink to the bottom to forget her dangerous relationship to Martin.
Winterbottom, as evidenced by the controversial 9 Songs, has never been a director to shy away from sexuality. It's surprising that I Want You was granted an R Rating considering that it has two things the rating boards typically can't tolerate; explicit sexuality and explicitly adult ideas. The actors might all, at one point or another, be nude but it is ultimately a film of thought and the character's fulfillment of separate cycles of abuse that give it its strength.
Winterbottom has made better films than I Want You, Jude, Wonderland and 24 Hour Party People spring immediately to mind, but it's a very much a film worth seeking out. It's the last film that features this type of look by Idzaik, which isn't to take away from his great more mainstream subsequent work, and one of the first great performances by the now Oscar winning Weisz. Most importantly it's an authentically good adult film, one that exposes as much of the heart and mind as the flesh.