Kristen Johnson's "Cameraperson" is a Fascinating Experimental Memoir
- Raffi Roberts
- Oct 20, 2016
- 6 min read
via Kristen Johnson: a still shot from the movie Cameraperson
The opening title sequence focuses on a wide stretched highway, with dark clouds clogging the sky. We see a car drive by every several seconds. After a few silent moments later, we see lightning and roaring thunder, but also, you hear a person behind the camera breathily whisper “wow.” A couple quiet moments more, she sneezes. Twice. The camera rattles a bit. Then the title pops up: Cameraperson. And this sets up this incredible film perfectly, if not, sums it all up.
Cameraperson is described by director, Kirsten Johnson, as a memoir, as it is a compilation of outtakes, unused material, and other miscellaneous footage from previous documentaries she has worked on over the past twenty-five years as a cinematographer, including Fahrenheit 9/11, Citizenfour, Derrida, and more.
But more than just a personal memoir, it works as a meta-narrative work, a meditation on the relationship between camera and subject and the ethical dilemmas that naturally arise, and a poststructuralist challenge to how we watch film and respond as a viewer. More impressively, it works on all these levels simultaneously.
Although the film is essentially a collage of cut away clips, deliberation and purpose is inherent, proven through the carefully hand-picked clips and the manner in which these episodes are placed together. There’s no voice-over narration or obvious guide, but there is definitely a coherent direction where Johnson is moving. Johnson and editor, Nels Bangerter, have such an elegant confidence in this experimental storytelling that even though you’re sifting through unrelated scenes from a myriad of different stories, you trust them as your driver. You just have to meet the film halfway for its magic to work.
I had the pleasure of watching a Q & A screening of Cameraperson with Johnson in attendance. She is a fascinating intellectual that is passionate about the power of framing. She escapes the table upfront and takes the microphone with her around the room. She makes a point that by placing herself in different parts of the room, it forces the audience to physically turn to her and also allows her to make observations about the audience she wouldn’t have possibly noticed if she was stationed in her seat the entire time.
This love for framework manages to manifest heavily in her art. One scene in the film involved a teenager in an abortion clinic, who requested to retain anonymity. Instead of using the standard silhouette tactic, Johnson chooses to let the camera focus on her hands on her lap. The woman’s hands fidget throughout while talking about this difficult topic, constantly picking at her shirt and anxiously intertwining her fingers. Her nervous hands accompanied by her fragile voice accusing herself of being a terrible person for being in this situation is absolutely more powerful because it speaks louder than what conventional framing would reduce it to. Also, Johnson stated that the particular framing of that shot forces the viewer to confront the very area of the body – lap, thighs, crotch – where, as she put it, “everything is going down.” The scene ends with Johnson breaking from her role of objectivity to comfort the young woman and to say, “you are not a bad person.”
Resisting to intervene with the subject is a big rule in documentary filmmaking so this is another aspect of cinematic language she examines. There is one slightly unnerving scene where she is filming a Bosnian toddler and another very young boy recklessly playing with an axe. We hear her concern from behind the camera, and can assume the struggle of refraining from shouting “PLEASE STOP” to these little kids before they chop off a hand. Where do we draw the line between filming uninterrupted “truth” and cutting in out of some sort of moral obligation? Another scene involves an elderly Bosnian woman getting in a heated debate with the translator about whether or not systematic violence against women is present in their country, and Johnson cuts to ask the woman, “were you always this stylish?” Johnson chose to completely diffuse the tension, but didn’t stop the kids playing with an axe. It’s interesting to think about why Johnson chooses to adhere to the no-intervention rule and when she decides not to employ it, and raises questions about the ethical conundrums that surround being a passive figure behind a camera in considerably less privileged areas.
Arguably, the most controversial scene in the film involves a midwife in Nigeria struggling to keep a newborn baby breathing. Johnson follows the woman take the baby from birth to another room and attempting to make the child breathe. The midwife gets the child breathing, but only sporadically as it lays mostly motionless while the the woman searches for oxygen, which is not available anywhere. We linger on this whole situation for quite some time.
Is it irresponsible to show these uncomfortable images, or is it important to show the sad reality of the conditions some people in the world endure?
Another prominent string of clips involve showing the director’s late mother, Catherine, in the advanced stages of Alzheimers. She is slow moving and seldom understands anything that is going on. Johnson even admitted that her mother would hate that she is portrayed as such. At the Q&A, she even mentioned an anecdote about after a screening in Seattle, one of Catherine’s old friends walked up to Johnson and stated “That is not Caty Jo in that movie.” Johnson was touched because she was glad that someone in the world still knew who her mom really was. She also said she wasn’t ever going to use footage of her mother in her condition, but she did.
It seems that she used it solely to challenge the role of documentary filmmaking, and it does so organically. But having those heartbreaking, intimate images intercut with sequences of her baby twins watching cartoons and their fascination with a dead bird they found speaks about Johnson’s personal fears or questions surrounding family. It speaks on the frightening, yet inevitable, questions about aging and, given the hereditary nature of the disease, whether or not she will eventually follow suit.
The way the clips are assembled throughout are not without clear purpose either. There is an elegant momentum and a narrative and/or thematic drive throughout. There is a montage near the start that show people simply walking or running through in different parts of the world in different circumstances, which I feel solidifies the connection between these episodes, perhaps through humanity or simple familiarity of the mere act of walking. On their own, these clips would be useless cutaways but put together in context, its transcendent. One scene shows Johnson’s twins in their diapers innocently playing around with her camera directly after a clip where it showed her and her crew being stopped outside of an Al-Queda detention center and telling her crew to turn off the camera. As with other scenes involving her kids, it illustrates a fear of loss or compromise of family and by having the adorable home video side-by-side a tense clip of her being stopped in a severely dangerous situation in juxtaposition expertly reinforces the idea of urgent idealist work vs family comfort in an entirely unique fashion.
Of course, with any experimental endeavor, there are plenty of moments of opaque meaning that seem impenetrable to try to comprehend why it’s in the movie in the first place and many will dismiss parts of the film as unnecessary indulgence, but those moments work in favor of the memoir aspect of the film.
“A lot of the material that end up in the film are things I forgot about,” I paraphrase from Johnson. She got the idea for Cameraperson when someone asked her if she still had footage of an incident she had when she stepped on a nail and bled profusely when filming for a project. That event hadn’t crossed her mind at all in years and it prompted her to find the footage of that time. And then other times. She found that a vast amount of unused, cut-away footage means a great deal now.
So, interestingly, instead of a conventional memoir where a subject talks impressionistically of times remembered, Johnson creates a retrospective memoir of times forgotten and resurfaced with immense meaning. While postmodernist art tends to be alienating and detached, she uses experimentalism in a way that is deeply emotional, philosophical, and profound. To remember life, you remember awkward pauses and social hiccups. Those are the glances toward the camera a Brooklyn boxer does when he’s being filmed, or the quiet lingering of a interviewee in front of a camera waiting for what the director wants to talk about next, or two camera people talking about how there’s too much haze in a shot and how they should frame the next shot, and so forth.
With Cameraperson – easily one of the best films of the year -- Johnson articulates the adventures and difficulties that her career has brought her, the fears and questions that arise from it, how the relationship between camera and reality affects how we view the world, and the significant responsibility that artists and filmmakers have by using one of the most powerful tools to generate empathy -- the camera.
Raffi Roberts
Raffi is an aspiring writer/filmmaker from Bellingham, Washington, who attended and dropped out of The New School for Public Engagement and who is now attending Vancouver Film School next year. He has seen literally every movie that was in wide release from 2013-2015, a feat that, he hopes, will be useful someday.
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