Why Blog? (Part 2)

This was to have been the concluding posting of this particular topic, but I now feel the need for a reflective pause in between the "to hell with you anyway" approach set out yesterday and the more commercially-minded conclusions that will now have to wait their turn in the final part of the trilogy. This change of structure was brought about by a timely realisation that I had short-changed Kieslowski's Camera Buff (1979) in my review last week. When I finally gave it my undivided attention I realised that it contained some powerful, and quite cautionary lessons for all budding bloggers.

In fact I think it is the Polish title Amator that is the key to understanding why this film is an important, universal parable about artistic awakening and not just a quaintly drab local story about a brown-tie comrade whose life is complicated by a new hobby. Consider the following elements of the story:

• Filip purchases a 16mm camera in order to film the first months of his baby daughter - a personal diary
• His wife objects when he starts filming his daughter naked - his first brush with censorship
• One of the first non-baby things we see him filming is the television
• His boss recruits him to record company events- his vBlog goes corporate
• His boss buys a pen with a built-in light so he can make notes on the bits he wants cut out while watching Filip's films - more censorship
• Filip enters for a nationwide competition where one of the judges expounds on how the traditional media are bound by certain duties, yet amateurs like him could and should focus on their personal experience: "You can do what you want, that is your strength"
• It's precisely the material that wins him the attention of his peers and the Amateur Film-makers' Federation that most makes his boss most uncomfortable
• Filip's growing relationship and reputation with the wider creative community means that his company starts to lose control of him
• The film club and much of its cine equipment are paid for by his company. Later on Filip accepts film stock from the TV company. The films are certainly his creatively, but he has to confront the fact that ownership of the end product will never be wholly his own
• Filip's creative awakening comes packaged with a poltical awakening - he finds that it's very hard to report things around you without taking a position
• Yet he learns the hard way that things are not always as they seem and that there are sometimes disturbing moral consequences when you turn your camera on the world
• "Before opening your mouth you must think of the damage you can do" cautions the boss of the plant belatedly when these consequences already have been felt
• "Only Nature can be shown as it really is" muses Filip in response, and then finds the motivation to overcome this quandry: "If you feel right, nothing else matters"
• The film ends when Filip, alone at home after his wife has taken his daughter and gone back to live with her mother, turns the camera back on himself.
  

Kieslowski made a critical switch to fictional film-making shortly before writing the script for Camera Buff. He later admitted that some of the real-life documentaries that Filip makes in the story are projects that he had abandonned un-realised when he himself had come to understand that the documentary film-maker was usually a dangerously intrusive presence in the lives of his subjects.

Amator won a prize in Moscow and garnered some international attention, but it wasn't until the Decalogue was widely broadcast ten years later that the Pole was admitted to the Pantheon of European cinema. For most of his prime he was paddling in the backwater - in blogging terms, a humble node rather than a privileged hub. (Or what Steve Rubel calls a vocal yokel)

In an interview on the DVD's extra features menu Kieslowski's friend and fellow acclaimed Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi attributes this neglect to the fact that "perception is hard".

In blogs, rather like all creative endeavours, some postings are like lonesome particles while a select few sing like vibrating strings. These qualitative distinctions cut across the standard sociology of the blogosphere. Nodes take heart - you don't have to be one of the most widely read and syndicated bloggers to aspire to stringiness!

Before I go, I think it's worth relating one rather good gag in Camera Buff. One of Filip's supervisors attempts to warn him of the dangers of his irrepressible vocation, recounting how his own brother discovered God at thirty and came to no good. "What happened?" asks Filip. "He became a priest" replies the supervisor wryly.