Written and directed by Kirsten Johnson
Cameraperson, Kirsten Johnson’s curated montage of shots gathered over 25 years as a documentary cinematographer, begins with a direct plea to us, her audience.
“I ask you to see it as my memoir,” she asks, and with these nine words, turns this cavalcade of boxers from Brooklyn, war crime victims, teenage mothers, ailing mothers, and public prosecutors into a narrative wherein intensely personal considerations like the idea of woman- and motherhood link with the professional dilemmas of her work as someone who’s asked subjects to relive their darkest moments for her to immortalize.
The impetus is a tragedy close to home: Johnson’s mother suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, spurring her to trace something akin to her mother’s outline against the suffering and grace found in this eclectic assembly of footage.
It’s quite ambitious, her attempt to take an immediate and personal pain and reach for broader meaning through her encounters with strangers, some of them far removed in time and place, but Johnson’s grounded presentation holds your hand throughout. We hear her voice in many of the clips, offering her thoughts and reactions to what’s before her, and the placement of clips makes you feel as if Johnson’s seated next to you, flipping through a picture book and leading you through its poignant memories.
Anyone who has an interest in the craft of documentary filmmaking will also find a goldmine in Cameraperson, as it offers insight into the many editorial decisions that happen during any shoot. To have things look natural takes a lot of work. We hear thoughts on lighting, shoots being planned on the fly, compositions being framed, then reframed in favor of a more telling shot, interviewees being repositioned for a more natural line of sight to the interviewer, and the peculiarities of shooting footage at Guantanamo Bay. It’s a thrill to listen to an expert explain the mechanisms whereby something is done, and done well, and Cameraperson is a master class in this regard.
Add to this forays into the consequence and ethics of documentary filmmaking. There are many hard scenes in Johnson’s film, as survivors of the war in Bosnia tell of being dragged to a local gym to be raped and killed, or a young boy tells the story of how he watched his brother die in gruesome fashion following a rocket strike. How do you maintain professionalism and not be affected by what you hear? Do you have a right to be traumatized by others’ lived trauma?
A point of criticism of Cameraperson might be that it’s too full, leaping from subject to subject with speed. These topics could warrant full-length features of their own and the result is that Jonson’s movie does cover a large area, but it doesn’t hit hard as a collected thought. In her preface, Johnson explains these shots have been selected because they’re the moments that have stuck with her all these years, and you definitely see why, because the moments of Cameraperson are what sticks with you as well, rather than the experience as a whole.
Beyond the harrowing recollections of war survivors, there’s a tender interview with a teenage mother plagued with the guilt of what she’ll do with this unwanted pregnancy, the shot taking in only her hands, wringing in anguish. Or an extended sequence of a Nigerian midwife working to save a baby struggling to breathe, an effort frustrated by the hospital’s lack of resources, but in spite of which the midwife soldiers on with a stoicism beyond most people.
These indelible moments speak to the power of documentary filmmaking, but the creative decisions of how they’re captured speak to the skill of Johnson and her collaborators. This combination makes Cameraperson something of a marvel as a novel experience that pushes the boundaries of the medium and offers a compassionate, revelatory view of a tough to trace, tough to stomach subject, delivered with the warmth and caring of someone with a deep human reserve.
Mikkel Frederiksen 