Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Camera Buff
1979 · Krzysztof Kieślowski · Camera Buff on Sightlines
A man buys a movie camera because his daughter has just been born. Eight millimetre, the sort sold to hobbyists in a country where hobbies were state-approved and amateur film clubs came with sponsorship. He buys it to film her. The first thing Filip Mosz points it at is a sleeping baby. The last thing he points it at is his own face. Everything Kieślowski learned in a decade of documentary work sits in the gap between those two shots.
Watch the film once and something odd about how it looks starts to nag. Jacek Petrycki, who shot Kieślowski's documentaries, gives the outer film almost nothing: available light, drab functional rooms, frontal compositions, no visible taste. The good-looking images in Camera Buff are the ones Filip shoots. That's a design. Deleuze has a name for what it produces. He calls it a dicisign: perception framed inside another perception, so you stop simply seeing and start noticing that you are being shown. Most films hide their own act of looking. Here the outer camera stays sober precisely so the inner camera's discoveries land as discoveries, and the cost of the arrangement is that you feel the outer camera too. Two machines in the room, and one of them is yours.
This is worth insisting on, because without it Camera Buff is just a cautionary tale about a husband who neglected his wife. With it, the film is running an experiment, and Filip's camera is the variable.
Halina Nawrocka's editing is patient and plain, scene-length, no flourish. It has to be, because cutting is the film's subject and can't also be its style. Deleuze, writing about classical cinema, treats montage as the unit that makes meaning, the place where a film says what it thinks. Kieślowski keeps that and attaches a bill to it. Filip's superiors trim his footage. Filip trims his own. Then he works out that a splice he made in a warm room, pleased with himself, has cost a colleague his livelihood. The cut stops being grammar and becomes a deed with a victim.
Which puts pressure on the edge of the frame. Deleuze's out-of-field is the ordinary fact that a frame implies a space just outside it, continuous with what you see. In a censored industry that space has an office. The Party boss who hands Filip the commission is the same man who decides what comes out of it, so the border of Filip's images isn't a compositional choice but a jurisdiction. His education is mostly learning where that border runs and who besides him is allowed to move it.
Kieślowski stages Filip again and again just behind or beside the camera, until the apparatus is physically wedged between him and the people he loves, Irka most of all. Deleuze calls a posture that exposes a social relation a gest. This is one, and it is merciless. The man isn't turning away from his wife. He is looking at her through the object that turned her into material. You can watch a marriage end in a body position.
The film is exact about what film can do: the whir, the splice, the reversal. It knows you can run an image backward and bring a dead colleague back onto the screen for a few seconds. Deleuze's crystal-image is the moment an actual image and its virtual double lock together so tightly that neither can be told from the other. The man is gone, and the man is right there on the wall. What Kieślowski does with the crystal is unusual: he treats it as hardware. The power to reverse time belongs to a projector, the power to console belongs to whoever owns the projector, and they are the same power. That's what frightens him.
For most of its length this is a film of the movement-image. Filip perceives a situation, acts, and the situation changes: the camera, the commission, the prize, the trip to the festival. Then the last movement dismantles the circuit. He turns the lens on himself, and the film closes on the image of its own making. He has become a seer, Deleuze's voyant, the one who can only watch and endure because no available action repairs anything. The film ends as a discourse-image, posing a problem it declines to solve. The loop is airtight: seer and seen in one body, no next move.
Under state socialism, the People is a finished thing a camera is meant to illustrate, and Filip is commissioned to illustrate it. What he keeps producing instead are persons. A face, a colleague, a room, none of which will compose into the official whole, several of which are damaged by being shown at all. Deleuze's formula for modern political cinema is that the people are missing: you cannot represent a people that doesn't yet exist, you can only help invent one by catching people in the act of telling their own story. Kieślowski runs that on two levels. Filip fabulates his town. And Krzysztof Zanussi walks into the fiction as himself, with Camouflage screening inside it, so the actual Cinema of Moral Anxiety appears in its own film, legending itself.
The engine is Keaton's: in The Cameraman (1928) an ordinary man gets an apparatus and his life reorganizes around it. The reflexive mode is Vertov's, since Man with a Movie Camera (1929) first put the shooting, the cutting and the cameraman on screen as the subject. But Vertov's cameraman is a hero of the new vision and Kieślowski's is a casualty of it, and that inversion is the argument. The surface texture is neorealism's, Bicycle Thieves and its unglamorous provincial routine, plus Bazin's case that a camera owes something to the world it points at and not only to the story it serves. Peeping Tom had already made the lens predatory. 8½ had already turned the apparatus on the artist's own paralysis, and Filip's last shot answers it. Blow-Up had already found the truth the naked eye missed and implicated the man holding the negative.
Kieślowski's own invention is the smallest item on that list and the hardest. Every earlier film about film handed the ethics of looking to somebody exceptional: a visionary, a maestro, a murderer. He handed it to an amateur. Filip has no gift and no vision, just a machine and enthusiasm, and the film demonstrates that this is fully sufficient to ruin a life. It is also why the picture pushed its own director out of documentary for good. He had spent the decade pointing cameras at real people and had come to believe the lens could expose and harm them, and Amator is the argument he made to himself in public, at Moscow, in front of a jury that gave it the Grand Prix.
Watch it again for the two cameras. Notice which images are beautiful and who shot them. Then sit with the fact that the amateur's camera is now in every pocket, and Filip's education, the one that cost him a marriage and a friend's job, is something the rest of us are expected to have picked up on our own.
Concepts in play
- dicisign — Petrycki's outer camera is deliberately unshowy (available light, drab functional interiors, frontal compositions) so that Filip's own 8mm footage registers as the aesthetic act — the dossier's 'we watch a camera watching a man learning to use a camera,' with the outer frame kept sober enough that the inner frame's discoveries feel like discoveries.
- montage — Nawrocka's transparent, scene-length cutting set against a plot whose ethical crisis is an editing crisis: Filip's material trimmed by his superiors, and his own keep/cut choices costing a colleague his livelihood — 'the act of cutting is dramatized as a moral event.'
- out-of-field-relative — The Party functionary who commissions Filip's work and then edits it; the plot turns on what may and may not be shown inside a censored, subsidized industry, so the frame's edge is an administrative jurisdiction.
- the-gest — Staging that repeatedly places Filip behind or beside his camera so the apparatus becomes a physical wedge between him and the people he films, most painfully his wife Irka.
- hyalosign (crystal-image) — The film's attention to the mechanical facts of the medium — the whir, the splice, the ability to run an image backward to resurrect a dead colleague on screen — plus the recurring frame-within-frame of viewfinder, projected image on a wall, and television screen.
- the seer (voyant) — The final movement: Filip turns the camera on himself, a structural rhyme with the opening that closes the film on the image of its own making, with no action left that repairs the marriage, the colleague, or the footage.
- discourse-image — A bildungsroman 'in which the education is chiefly an education in guilt'; the ending's turn inward converts the story into an unresolved meditation on the filmmaker's self-implication rather than settling the ethical question it raises.
- the people are missing — Named the plant's semi-official chronicler by the local Party boss, Filip is commissioned to produce the collective portrait and keeps producing exposed individuals instead — the Cinema of Moral Anxiety's scrutiny of the individual inside the institution.
- fabulation (story-telling / legending) — Krzysztof Zanussi appears on screen as himself and his 1977 Camouflage figures within the story, folding the real Cinema of Moral Anxiety into the fiction, while Filip's amateur footage constructs the town's account of itself.