Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1983 film Camera Buff opens with the start of life. The main character, Filip Mosz (Jerzy Stuhr), and his wife, Irka (Malgorzata Zabkowska), are expecting the birth of their first child. It’s euphoric — Filip and his friends drink, dance, and sing, eagerly awaiting the arrival of his daughter. In anticipation, Filip purchases an 8mm camera, hoping to capture his daughter’s maturation.
Thus, with one seemingly insignificant choice, Filip sets in motion the chain of events that, over the course of the film, lead to the destruction of his family and his entire way of life.
In 1997, just before her death, movie star Maureen O’Sullivan famously observed that “Film has given us immortality.” Conventional wisdom agrees: in the emotional climax of Damien Chazelle’s ill-fated love letter to cinema, Babylon, Jean Smart’s character, a film critic, tells a fading actor (Brad Pitt) that “In a hundred years, when you and I are long gone, anytime someone threads a frame of yours through a sprocket, you will be alive again.”
It’s a romantic notion that one can live forever simply by being filmed, and it’s one that Filip wholeheartedly embraces, hoping to preserve his daughter’s infancy — much to his detriment. He seeks to preserve the present but is constantly stuck in the past. He spends each moment thinking about how to preserve the experience but never actually experiences anything.
Filip’s obsession shifts from merely preserving his daughter’s life to other documentary forms as the film progresses. His community encourages him to make more films, as he’s the only person in town with a camera, though his artistic pursuit quickly outgrows what he has been asked to do. He submits his work to a local film festival, at which he receives the third prize, and soon becomes fixated on the world of cinephilia and a young woman named Anna (Ewa Pokas), neglecting his wife.
Where Filip seeks to capture life, Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal), the central character in Dan Gilroy’s 2014 film Nightcrawler, seeks to capture death. He films crime scenes, selling the footage to the local news station, whose producers encourage more gruesome, invasive, and provocative footage. What starts as a money-making scheme quickly grows into an artistic obsession, with Lou replaying his own footage on a loop, studying lighting and framing techniques.
Life and death are the most fundamental components of the human experience. Kieślowski and Gilroy illustrate the dangers of attempting to capture them while also representing the obsession with and lust for doing so. The characters are proxies for the filmmakers, serving as cautionary tales for when the obsession goes too far.
In both films, the protagonists are encouraged to continue filming by figures of authority from whom they seek validation. For Lou Bloom, this authority figure is Nina, the local news producer who purchases his recordings. For Filip, the festival jury packages their criticism in encouragement, validating his burgeoning talent. Both characters are motivated by criticism, seeking to prove their critics wrong by filming more and more “authentically.” When read as an allegory for the filmmaking process, these figures can be understood as stand-ins for the audience — by watching and critiquing movies, we encourage perversion.
At the end of both films, the characters are fully lost in the void of filmmaking and its accompanying emotional depravity. Lou has built his stringing empire, hiring a fleet of employees (to replace the ones whose deaths he both instigated and filmed) and arming them with technologically advanced gear. It’s clear that any sense of guilt that he may have felt earlier in the narrative is gone — his morals have been outcast in favor of his religious devotion to cinema.
Likewise, Camera Buff ends with Filip alone. His wife and child have left, and he has nothing left to film. Rather than turning the camera off and reflecting on his actions, Filip turns it around, pointing it at himself. The construct of film has collapsed in on itself, and the filmmaker, camera, and subject have become one. All that matters, all that exists, is the film.
While they are vastly different films, Nightcrawler and Camera Buff share one simple thesis: cinema is destructive. To attempt to capture life on film is to attempt the impossible, and the voluntary continuation of this pursuit is masochistic. In striving toward cinematic and artistic perfection, the characters sacrifice their humanity. They are no longer people — they are artists.
Both films depict the constant, impossible pursuit of capturing life, or the present, on film. While Filip and Lou seek to record reality, they are working against the laws of nature. Definitively, it’s in the past by the time it’s on camera. The characters live their lives through a camera lens, detached from the people and experiences surrounding them. While Lou and Filip have recreated an abstraction of life on screen, they’ve destroyed their humanity in the process. They embark on an unending quest to recreate their life on film — but the quest is futile, and the characters are doomed, forever chasing their tails in pursuit of what has already passed them by.
