This enthusiastic response is to Kirsten Johnson's Cameraperson (2016)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 March
This is a response – enthusiastic – to Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson (2016), shown for International Women’s Day by The Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge, on Wednesday 8 March 2017
Kirsten Johnson’s film luxuriates spiritedly in the constructed status and quality of cinema, whose nature as artefact, even in documentary, is usually heavily disguised – although, on the borders, there is little divide between documentaries and feature films, e.g. Man on Wire (2008), or the astonishing Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975) (screened in 2016 in the Chantal Akerman retrospective at Sheffield Documentary Festival (Doc / Fest, @sheffdocfest)).
It would not enrich a commendation of this excellent piece of cinema to distend it with an exact catalogue of the ways in which it works or has been assembled – though it possibly says too little that Kirsten Johnson works with juxtaposition and accumulation.
In a three-line inter-title at or near the start of the film¹, she tells us that the footage is taken from what she has shot for films during the last twenty-five years, but which was not used in the film in question. (Given that a documentary not untypically has more than a hundred hours of material – from which it is edited down to, at most, somewhere between two and three hours² - this is a large amount.) Johnson extrapolates from that fact to call the film that we are about to see, if not a testimony (one forgets her word), then at least describing it in such a way that we appreciate that it is far from being constituted as if it were any sort of demo-reel :
Johnson, rather, has graciously chosen what to show us not necessarily because it is technically best, but so that we can see, and appreciate, what she does, sometimes including, as she lines up or composes her shot, dialogue with her producer or other person in the production team (presumably actually recorded in situ from her camera’s microphone, which is how she asks us to perceive it).
Johnson shows footage, from which this is taken, for Derrida (2002), where she is negotiating how to film the group of people to whom Derrida is talking as he crosses the road
There are three broad ways in which, as we go, we are aware of Johnson working on documentaries, which are when she is filming on her own behalf, and so being the voice asking questions or engaging with the person on screen (even if through an interpreter), when – which is clearly Michael Moore’s film – working with him, on Fahrenheit 9 / 11 (2004), and somewhere in between, where the conversations that she is having as she shoots suggest that the film is co-directed, co-produced, or made alongside a sympathetic colleague. (On IMDb, Johnson has more credits as a producer than as a director.)
Marine Abdul Henderson and Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9 / 11 (2004)
In the footage shown, Johnson is talking to Moore about the technicalitities of arranging him, in relation to Henderson as his on-screen interviewee, and with The Capitol as a backdrop
Early on in Cameraperson, an assemblage of pieces of footage was presented at a great hurry, and which was also noisy (in the way that that sort of scratchiness of sound can be), which is very untypical of the film, because otherwise this work of editing (with film editor Nels Bangerter) shows that Kirsten Johnson wants to keep the rootedness and immediacy that she had when shooting, be it just a one-off attempt to film illicitly outside a prison for reasons of international interest, or where we see her several times, relating to who she is with and where that is. Nonetheless, it was a moment that suggested both the many places and people that are in her experience from close proximity, and, of them, the noise that news media seek to make for viewers.
In Foca, the camera searches rural environs ; the voice comments on the patches of wildflowers ; a shepherd and his flock trail by. When she finds the right composition, a hand emerges from the left, reaches around to the front of the camera and pulls a few blades of grass from the ground, so they’ll sully the frame no longer.
The vivid, fresh water-melon that is cut up by a member of the militia (in Iraq ?), but the men are called away, joking – to one knows not what – before they can eat any of it : such an evocative image. Before, towards the end of the film, we hear someone speaking for dignity, and for it to be applied to injured and dead bodies in the media as ‘The golden rule’, we have already seen it enacted by Johnson in her practice.
It is there in not gratuitously giving us gruesome insights into the evidence that had been presented to a court-room about how a man came to be dead, but in very deferentially shooting a woman’s knees and hands as she talks, hearing a young man talk plainly about what happened to his injured face, and hearing those who were raped in the occupation of Bosnia, and those who have been investigating these war-crimes.
In the feature film As if I am not There (2010)³, concerning the fate of younger women during The Bosnian War, director Juanita Wilson based it on dramatizing stories revealed during the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague
Now, from colleagues at TAKE ONE (@TakeOneCinema), a review of Cameraperson on the web-site [with a comment from #UCFF]
End-notes
¹ Apart from captions that locate us in, say, in Foča, Bosnia, or Kabul, Afghanistan, Johnson usually tells us relatively little about what we are seeing, or why we are seeing it, and has left what she has chosen to put on the screen to talk to other material, not just what immediately preceded or follows it. For example, we are in Brooklyn, New York, a couple of times early on, but the significant and longer clip is near the end of the film, and which sheds light on all that we have seen in between. (The principal exceptions to saying little by way of context are such as for footage of her twins, or of them with her father, or of her deceased mother (and her mother's artefacts and memorial place those things into time).)
² Even though many film-makers will edit ‘the rushes’ as they go, to keep on top of the scale and scope of the film.
³ The film had funding from a number of sources, including The Irish Film Board [and appears amongst Fifteen fine festival films].
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
