CAMERA BUFF

Watching Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Camera Buff (1979) in 2025, it’s hard to believe the film is nearly 50 years old. It still feels remarkably fresh, even though it portrays a dreary, colourless Poland under communist rule. Perhaps that’s why it seems so contemporary to me: my own country increasingly resembles that bygone society, with our current crop of Fabian “reds” running a top-down, big government that is rapidly crushing the freedoms of individuals.

Caught in the crosshairs of living under a kind of dictatorship while struggling to find a distinct creative voice, the young filmmaker Filip (Jerzy Stuhr) tries to establish his career even as his personal life unravels. Both his marriage and the arrival of a young child seem to be the two most significant sacrificial lambs for him to advance his career on purely selfish terms (the avoidance of reality in his own life while documenting the reality of others is a subtle irony as well). He is ultimately forced to reckon with the real-world implications of the impoverished human lives he captures in his documentaries, finally turning the camera on himself, where he is solely responsible for the subject matter at hand and is compelled to confront himself honestly at the core level of his true artistic expression.

In many ways, Camera Buff can be seen as Kieślowski’s 8½, symbolic of his transition from documentary to narrative film and his wrestling with his artistic conscience, as he sought to liberate himself from the ethical and political constraints of documenting life under communist rule.

The departure from reality to fiction was essential for Kieślowski to become one of the great, universally celebrated filmmakers. We can only assume that his fictional counterpart, Filip in Camera Buff, will go on to create similarly great masterpieces as his real-life creator.

In both their cases, art is freedom.