Cameraperson is
singular. It’s a complicated and entrancing autobiography built out of footage from
other nonfiction films. What we see and hear becomes a reconfiguring of what it
means to see and hear a film, the various sequences united only by the vision
they represent. As a movie about vision – about what we see, about what
filmmakers’ choose to show, about how these sights affect those who create and
those who view – there’s a multitude of vantage points one can take to begin to
make sense of it.
Here are a few.
1. It’s a movie as memoir. The cameraperson in question is
Kirsten Johnson, cinematographer and camera operator on dozens of documentary projects
over the past 20 years. In making this movie, she has collected and compiled
shots and scenes from her career, placing them together, not chronologically
but in some intuitive memory logic. Individually they are compelling,
fascinating, carrying the intellectual charge that brought the documentary crew
to capture them in the first place. But there’s a larger goal at work. We see
moments that have, as she writes, “marked” her and “leave me wondering still.” Slowly,
she adds personal footage, of her mother and father and children. Together they
add up to a portrait of a woman’s professional and personal life. There is no
narration. There is little explanatory text beyond a brief note at the
beginning telling us to take the following as memoir. We’re to view her in
every frame. She is her occupation.
2. It’s a movie about the woman behind the curtain. But it
doesn’t pull the curtain back or peek behind. She simply wants us to be aware
of the person there.
3. It’s a movie about work. We can get swept up in stories,
people, and vivid tableaus presented, but there’s always the understanding
Johnson is behind the camera. The film is a procession of images and sequences,
artful and intense, by turns emotional and clinical. But unlike their sources,
here there is new awareness placed on the hard work of their making. It draws
attention to the labor involved. What does a cameraperson do? She gets the
shots. She crafts the images. (One moment shows her hand dart in front of the
lens to pluck an errant clump of grass from distracting.) By showing us the
process through this context, she makes it clear we see what we see because she
decides we could. The movie features little in the way of looks behind the
scenes. What it does show us is what’s in the frame – and implies what’s
outside the frame – in the margins of the original works. Fleeting moments
reveal the personality behind the camera through a gasp, an command, an
admission of emotional investment, a worried concern, and hushed indications of
found profundity.
4. It’s a movie as clip reel, a portfolio. This is no diminishment,
because this is no That’s Entertainment! comprehensive
overview or utilitarian résumé. We’re not seeing greatest hits or notable
outtakes. We’re seeing moments. Through the scope of the projects presented, as
well as the diversity of subjects tackled, one can see the expertise Johnson
brings to each film on which she works. There’s a casual beauty to the way she
takes in landscapes and architecture, and an acute sensitivity to the emotions
of her interviews. Whatever it is, she throws herself into getting a good shot.
She races along next to philosopher Jacques Derrida down a street, trips walking
backwards in front of The New Yorker’s
cartoon editor Bob Mankoff, listens with empathy to a devastating story from a
child injured in an I.E.D. explosion (telling him she’s deeply moved). It’s a
movie of considerable skill, aptitude in every shot, a testament to her
talents.
5. It’s a movie of poetry, knowledgeably and thoughtfully
assembled. The details are precise, sharply drawn, well observed. Its tapestry
assembles slowly, deliberately, and patiently. What are we to make of the
connections between projects with disparate topics? Reading the surface you
could see a simple travelogue (Afghanistan, Alabama, Bosnia, Brooklyn,
Nigeria…) or a look at the varieties of modern documentary concerns (hot-button
politics, shameful tragedies, quirky character studies). Or you could look
closer, get beneath the tenuous and obvious strands, and see an interconnected
web of sensitive emotional connections and endless possibility for
interpretation. Recurring ideas of parents, children, emotional and literal
violence, and the aftermath of trauma (one haunting montage includes empty
buildings and fields where atrocities have taken place) are both specific and
symbolic. It feels like a carefully composed ode to her career, its meaning in
the world, and impact on her soul.
6. (It’s a movie of fonts. Here is where I must point out Johnson’s
incredible attention to detail extends to the typefaces. I didn’t think of this
on my own. Read Charlie Lyne in Filmmaker
Magazine with a brilliant dissection
here.)
7. It’s a movie as an invitation to think. Johnson doesn’t
want a passive viewer. No, by recontextualizing her past work in this new form
she invites a focus on why a shot was made, and on why we’re seeing it now. She
wants your intellectual involvement, not to take in and feel and react
passively, but to let the sounds and images light up your mind. All movies –
with the exception of the egregiously brain dead – activate thoughts. But
here’s one that cultivates a rhythm and space for active wondering about the
construction, drawing unavoidable attention to every artistic choice, each
frame, each cut.
8. It’s a movie that blends the personal and political, as
if there’s a difference to begin with. Jobs have taken her to troubled areas
all around the world. Everywhere, political strife has hurt. We glimpse it with
a USB drive from Citizenfour ground up in cement. And Michael Moore mid-Fahrenheit 9/11 promising he’ll try to
help a soldier who admits he plans to go AWOL before his next deployment. And women
in every corner of the globe bravely explaining their rapes, their kidnappings,
their decisions to have abortions. Johnson’s camera has captured much pain, and
the weight of these encounters make it clear that nothing is ever a simple case
of partisan or ideological talking points. Life is as political as it is messy.
9. It’s a movie of one life reflected in other people. Late
in the film is footage of Johnson returning to a small village to visit a
family she recorded years before. (We’ve seen some of them earlier, including
one harrowing shot of a toddler playing with a hatchet, hearing and sympathizing
with Johnson’s off-camera winces, aching with tension as she, and the camera,
keep an objective distance.) She wants to show them the final product and tell
them how much their kindness meant to her. Here’s something we don’t often see
in a documentary. Yes, there are the facts recorded. But what impact did it
have on those filmed, and those doing the filming? What we see as cinema vérité has an unseen reverse shot. Taken together they’d be a slice
of life for the fly on the wall, too. When we see glimpses of home movies,
Johnson’s twins or her dying mother or her aging father, we see a mostly happy
family with usual problems, and yet we also see a stark contrast to the human
misery she’s devoted her life to chronicling. When we hear her voice from
behind the camera, she’s not breaking the fourth wall. She’s behind it, the
engaged and empathetic artist and witness.
10. It’s a movie of juxtapositions. With editor Nels
Bangerter (who has worked on some of the same projects as Johnson) images,
ideas, feelings, impressions, and stories sit side by side. We see a tough
boxer taking a hard loss, then getting comforted by his mother. We see Johnson’s
mother slipping into Alzheimer’s. We see people around the world recounting
past trauma. We hear the urgent warnings of a translator and guide as military
in a far flung conflict zone suspiciously sizes up the presence of a doc crew
outside a prison. We see a creaking Ferris Wheel in Afghanistan. The world is
large, and full of surprise. Johnson finds the serendipity and logic behind the
vast differences and confluences, forcing to think about moments in new
contexts. We see the resilience of those who face the unthinkable, carry
unspeakable devastation, and continue forward, living their lives. The mundane
and the moving sit comfortably together.
11. It’s a movie as a way of understanding a mediator. What
is a cameraperson but the one who sees the things we can’t and brings it back
to us for our consideration? It’s her decision that shapes a moment, notices detail,
frames a narrative. With a director and editor it becomes a documentary’s
message. But she’s the source. It starts with her. Now she shapes it to her own
purposes, aiming it directly at the audience, with an understanding that
they’ll make of it what they will. Here’s what she saw. What do you make of it?
12. It’s a movie as metaphor. The cameraperson is a conduit
for so much human existence. She’s a purifier, collecting the most wrenching
moments of someone’s life (a limp newborn baby not breathing, the film’s most
harrowing sustained sequence; or an old woman’s testimony of kidnapping and
torture, hard even to hear) and making such grief useful to a wide audience. There
is the old concept of the sin-eater, a person who absolves the departed of their
pain by engaging in a ritual meal that allows them eternal peace. Taking in
others’ pain can be an act of kindness. Johnson includes an interview with
people investigating war crimes. They explain what a relief it is to the
victims to unburden themselves, and yet how difficult it is that now the
investigators must carry that burden with no release. Isn’t that true, also, of
the cameraperson along with them? Where can she go to take the pain she’s
recorded? She’s taken in the strong emotions, good and bad, of everything she’s
seen, and now it is a part of her. The only release is to share it with us.
13. Cameraperson is
a masterpiece.
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