Camera Buff
directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski, Poland 1979, 117’
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Filip, a young supplier at an industrial plant in a small town near Krakow, buys a film camera to record the birth and first days of his daughter's life. The news of the purchase spreads around the plant and Filip is offered to make a film to celebrate the company's five-year anniversary. The director of the plant even becomes the patron of the newly established amateur film club. The self-taught director begins to show what he sees, uncompromisingly displaying the degeneration of the surrounding reality. However, the price of truth is high.
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A self-referential story about the fascination with the film medium and reflections on the role of art entangled in the world of propaganda, political lies and manipulations distorting the true image of reality.
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- What is the task of film art: to perfect the form or to discover the truth? Why is Camera Buff considered the most important film of the cinema of moral anxiety movement? How much can one sacrifice in the name of art? What should be the most important value for a filmmaker? We will try to answer these and many other questions together with our club expert dr Mateusz Werner (PhD). We invite you to the screening and discussion, during which you will be able to ask questions and share your ideas on how to interpret the film. What do you think Camera Buff is about? We want to hear your opinion!
- Dr Mateusz Werner (PhD)
- Philosopher of culture, essayist, film critic, doctor of humanities. He graduated from the Faculty of Polish Studies at the University of Warsaw and the Graduate School for Social Research at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Junior Fellow of the Vienna Institute for Human Sciences. He was a guest lecturer in film studies at the Warsaw SWPS University, the National Film School in Łódź, the Faculty of Polish Studies and the Institute of Polish Culture at the University of Warsaw. He co-created programmes about film on public television: Seans filmowy [Film Séance] (Channel 2 of TVP) and Pół serio [Half Serious] (Channel 1 of TVP). For several years he managed the Film Art Gallery at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. In 2001-2010 he curated the film programme at the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. Editor of the quarterly journal Kronos. Currently he is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Humanities at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw, and from 2021 he’s been the editor-in-chief of the monthly journal Twórczość. He is interested in cinema as a cognitive instrument, a stimulus for thinking and factual evidence in the trial of the visible and the invisible.
