Camera Buff

Director: Krzysztof Kieślowski
Year Released: 1979
Rating: 3.0

A man acquires an 8mm movie camera to record his daughter's birth but gets carried away with the device's power, filming everything in immediate distance - his dedication to recording events leads him to get a job at work as their "in house" filmmaker. Despite its at-times heavy-handed nature, it's mostly a compelling examination of art as a jealous mistress, and how the man's obsession with making movies his own way ruins his family life and friendships - it's a testament to the power of the moving image to change the way we see the world around us and the ability of film to preserve the illusion of life (like when a friend's mother dies and he asks to not see the casket, but a reel of her waving from a window). At the very end, the man turns the camera on himself as a form of confession, with the priest as the camera and the man as the 'sinner' - he may feel remorse about the destruction he caused, but it's also unlikely that he'll give up sinning.