Imagine taking all the leftover, unfinished, stranded bits of your life – the parts that you never intended others to see – and crafting those pieces into something that can be accessed and experienced by audiences. This is, in a manner of speaking, the premise of Cameraperson, Kirsten Johnson’s deeply personal exploration of the ethics of making art through the medium of film.
Johnson has worked on many high-profile documentaries in recent years, and used footage from some of those films in Cameraperson to illustrate the highly flexible, malleable nature of art and cinema. The result of this unique, almost montage-like effort thoughtfully conveys the reality that reality itself is nothing but the product of how images are ordered and presented. They can be endlessly reframed to present a vastly different kind of truth, which puts our interpretative abilities to the test, and illuminates facets of human nature that, perhaps, would never have been explored in such a way.
Transitioning back and forth from more than a dozen places all over the world – from Bosnia, to Brooklyn, to Nigeria, to Afghanistan, to Washington state (and many in between) – Johnson has constructed something almost like an essay or analysis, both on a personal and a wider, perhaps political, level. Yet still, it stands apart from typical essay films; while we hear her voice many times, and in many different places, she’s not necessarily speaking to us explicitly, and she does not command the kind of authoritative tone that can be found in essay films. Rather, the footage largely speaks for itself.
The way in which Johnson has structured the film – with minimal instances of music, brief title cards to introduce location, and shots that linger on hands, faces, landscapes, and moments – restores a sense of agency in its subjects that documentaries sometimes end up displacing for a one-sided, usually Westernized point of view. Johnson’s subjects hold as much power in terms of where the film goes, and what its ultimate fate is, as the directing itself. The narrative is, in this sense, almost like a dance, not just back and forth between places and moments in time (and the footage is not meant to be chronological, so there is a non-linear undertone to it), but also between distance and intimacy, subject and camera, and the perspective that is gained in this fragile divide.
Though Johnson does not speak directly to us through words, she speaks to us through a powerful, visual, cinematic language. Linguistic barriers are a common feature in many of the places where Johnson has filmed, and we come to know that she is traveling with interpreters in those locations. But the universal language of emotion, of love and respect, and the mutual understandings that can be generated in cross-cultural interactions – as well as how these encounters are interpreted through cinematic composition – comes through in a particularly intimate way throughout the film.
In Afghanistan, for example, a young boy is interviewed about his blind eye – we are led to assume that an act of violence has caused this – as well as the murder of his brother, who was killed in the streets of Kabul. I’m not entirely sure if Johnson carried out the interview, or if it was someone else, but it becomes clear that it’s getting harder and harder for the boy to continue with this painful story. The shot never changes, lingering upon his face, preserving every subtle adjustment in facial expression. He stops for a moment, and the interviewer begins to ask something, but also stops; he encourages her to ask again, but she can’t. At this moment she says, “You’re making me cry even though I don’t understand the language!” It is moments like these that illustrate the capacity for a universal language to exist, one that is as all-encompassing as it is intimate.
In Foča, a small town in rural Bosnia to which Cameraperson returns many times, Johnson peers at the life of a family, sometimes just watching them – especially the children at first, like a small child playfully wielding an axe, followed by an older sibling who tries to demonstrate its proper use – and at other times, asking questions through an interpreter. These moments convey the variety of techniques that are involved in the production of documentary film: sometimes you intervene, sometimes you don’t, and deciding precisely when to do the latter is an incredibly subjective and intuitive process. Again, it is a question of intimacy, and how to gain trust in an environment to which you may never return, with people who you may never see outside of the context of filmmaking.
Although Johnson feels conflicted about the nature of these interactions, writing in a director’s statement about the “implicit and often…unseen” dilemmas of filming people who “are in immediate and often desperate material need,” these scenes reveal, almost immediately, the deep sense of empathy and kindness she feels toward her subjects. Returning to Foča five years after her first trip, to the same family we have come to know piece by piece, she tries to express how deeply touched she was by their warmth and friendship, despite the underlying circumstances that brought her there in the first place (this being, of course, the premise of a documentary film, as well as the violence that once happened there). While she struggles to convey her feelings, she stands behind the camera, allowing us to continue watching, and learning from, this family.
Johnson’s ability to see through the tragic circumstances of what is filmed – the aftermath of war, grief, death, poverty, and displacement, to name a few things – to show who is filmed makes Cameraperson the moving portrait that it is. It’s curious to think of this as a portrait of Johnson, as there’s only one scene in which we see her face. But this scene brings to mind another facet of the film’s cinematic language that is worth exploring. In it, Johnson is filming and speaking directly to her mother, who lives with Alzheimer’s disease, and who we met earlier at a homestead in Wyoming. They’re standing in a bathroom, with a wide mirror behind them. Instead of encouraging her mother to use the mirror to look at herself, Johnson attempts to show what she looks like on camera at that moment. Then, she tries to capture both of them in the shot, this time leaning against the mirror to make use of more space; after struggling for a few seconds, Johnson’s face appears clearly, next to her mothers, and she smiles. Later on, in Washington state, Johnson reaches in front of the camera, carefully arranging items on a table (she might have chosen to include the already-arranged shot, though it is more interesting to see this process). One of these items is the cremated remains of her mother, with her name printed on the front. This kind of unspoken communication is made possible purely through the medium of moving image, and it is why Cameraperson’s narrative structure and storytelling ability are so strong.
The film also leads viewers to ask questions that are familiar in the world of documentary filmmaking, and cinema in general – how does one capture the authentic experience of other people in a way that is authentic, or true, to oneself? What does authenticity mean in this context – is it an attainable goal? Confronting these questions head-on, Cameraperson is meditative, showing an array of possibilities that life behind the camera can bring. Stylistically, it is very different from the kinds of documentaries that are popular nowadays, even those on which Johnson has worked in the past. In these kinds of films, narration or dialogue is almost constant, as well as musical soundtracks (which often aren’t very unique, and have been recycled in film after film after film). Just because he’s featured in Cameraperson, I also think of Michael Moore’s documentaries, which function off of shock value, revealing facts in a way that gets viewers to react in the strongest way possible. While most documentaries nowadays are perhaps more measured in tone than Moore’s films, this heavy-handed approach can be found everywhere, detracting from the way in which images speak for themselves.
But Cameraperson does the opposite of that, and that’s why it’s so refreshing and exciting for me to see. It plays with the boundaries of documentary film, showing us something that isn’t quite personal documentary, isn’t quite essay-film, but rather, incorporates the best qualities of each of those, almost seamlessly. Cameraperson allows us to sit with its material, to watch and just watch, without intrusion, without being interrupted by outside voices or sounds. It’s a kind of simplicity that, from my perspective, hasn’t been a commonplace convention of documentary film since direct cinema and cinema verite came on the scene in the 1960s, introducing the so-called ‘fly on the wall’ approach. But Cameraperson does not employ that approach entirely, standing in between observational and interactive. Crucially, there’s enough room to breathe, to take things in slowly.
And Camerperson’s interactions are never overdone; rather, they’re sometimes very minute, as subtle as a gasp that’s let out when lightning strikes against an otherwise serene Missouri sky (followed by a sneeze, which led some viewers to laugh at the screening I attended). Hearing Johnson marvel at this unexpected turn of events showed the kind of wonderment that making documentary films can (and should!) be all about. It’s a sense of wonderment not just directed at what nature can do, at its boundless power, but also at the ability to capture it through film, granting us the ability to harness that power, even if for just a moment. The fact that Johnson has organized these moments into a communicable work is a powerful gift to us.
Cameraperson
2016
dir. Kirsten Johnson
102 min.
