Cameraperson: And thus she turned into film

“I feel like I have a Cronenberg fantasy about having a camera that was a part of my body”. The aforementioned utopian transformation of our human physique belongs to filmmaker Kirsten Johnson, as she manifests in her dynamic street interview with Reverse Shot (2016). Such conception of the self isn’t just another wild transhuman delusion, Johnson is actually proposing an eternal bond with “our” films. Indeed, mind and body forever attached to the world we uncover frame by frame. Despite the uncanny imagination ingrained in this cinematic paradise, Johnson herself might have already given us a taste of her personal heaven. Her most known film to date is Cameraperson, a memoir built with bits of her audiovisual resumé as a cinematographer in documentaries for almost 25 years. The camera and its operator (or is it the other way around?) work in brief lapses of time in different towns, cities and regions all around the world, always searching to embrace someone. A deep dive into the heterogeneous structure of the documentary ends up revealing the personal implications of filming non-fiction —the tangible existence of its creator. Make no mistake, Cameraperson is an intimate arrangement of Johnson’s relationship with the world she has been tasked to capture.

A thunderbolt strikes the Earth, Kirsten Johnson sneezes —perhaps one of the most unique shots in film history. Cameraperson is a vessel of raw and technically unfinished images. Throughout the years and the projects that have paved Johnson’s career, numerous subjects and places have come and gone through her camera. Some of them are beautiful portraits achieved by the director’s cinematic finesse, but plenty of the produced images are unforeseen incidents. These moments that might lack any precise purpose are the actual flesh and bones of Cameraperson. As the world unfolds in front of her, Johnson laughs, sobs and cries, always holding the camera in search of an expressive, revelatory composition. As K. Austin Collins puts it for The Ringer (2016), “The sum of it all is a window into the experiences of Johnson herself, the woman who was there, camera in hand, trying to get the right light, adjusting the frame”. Indeed, these images are far from the “passive observer” canon. Actually, to watch Cameraperson is to experience a woman uncovering the world for herself, while making dozens of films along the way.

Despite the loose qualities of its memoir approach, Cameraperson manages to avoid being just another entertaining yet hollow audiovisual compendium. Piece by piece, Johnson gradually unveils the threads that make her film a personal reflection rather than a superficial compilation of footage. If dots are to be connected, montage is, of course, the quintessential engine. Universal actions are the first patterns to be recognized. Johnson spots a similar walking pace in both a group of kids in the street and a row of guarded prisoners. As the film progresses, each scene starts to find a stronger bond with its predecessors and successors. For instance, late visits to Guantanamo, Bosnia and Afghanistan recall the still present reflections of trauma in these now desolate locations. Remnants of violence bound to certain places even by the time Johnson is there to film. In spite of the spatial and temporal distance between each event, the person behind the camera becomes the link that ties their stories together. These are the memories of Kirsten Johnson, Cameraperson exists as a part of her, embedded in her own personal representations of the world.

A strikingly resonant element of Johnson’s gaze can be noticed in her closeness with each subject. Just like she can achieve charming traces of light in every shot, Johnson is also concerned with her role as a filmmaker, especially in relation to every human being present in each one of his frames. The fundamental questions of Cameraperson are appropriately pointed out in Alissa Wilkinson’s review for Vox (2017), “The act of discerning links between what Johnson has seen, and how she has seen it, reveals to us not just her conscious but her conscience — a deep and genuine humanism laced with ambivalence about some of the ethical issues of documentary filmmaking”. These traits mentioned by Wilkinson are perfectly exemplified by Johnson’s conversation with Witness 99, a survivor of systemic sexual abuse against Muslim women in Bosnia. Primarily, the director defines her ethical boundaries by respecting her subject’s anonymity. However, she perceives, and proceeds to film, the roots of personal expression in this woman’s hands. The camera, and therefore Johnson too, is eager to meet, experience and listen to other human beings. Kirsten Johnson acknowledges her role as an outsider —which is invariably enhanced by the technological device attached to her— hoping to establish an equitable relationship with her subject.

The permanent state of evolution in documentary film has brought to light the subjective mechanisms that turn non-fiction into another filmmaking illusion, but perhaps that’s not its final stage. With Cameraperson, Kirsten Johnson treats the camera as an extension of herself. Pick a random scene and watch a woman adopt film as her fundamental means to explore her surroundings and thus create a space for herself in the world. “Showing my children the people I was with when I was away is a way of showing them who I am”, Johnson once declared in an interview with Movie Mezzanine (2016). As is the case with Cameraperson, below every additional layer of substance and meaning, you can find in film, the living memories of a person carefully staring at a vast universe of possibilities.

Title: Cameraperson

Country: USA

Year: 2016

Director: Kirsten Johnson

Script: Lisa Freedman, Doris Baizley

Photography: Kirsten Johnson

Length: 103 minutes

Production Company: Fork Films, Big Mouth Productions

Collins, K. (2016). How Does a Documentary Get Made?. Retrieved 13 October 2020, from https://www.theringer.com/2016/9/7/16045816/how-does-a-documentary-get-made-c 12f497f6a38#.m5cgomrqg

Hynes, E., & Reichert, J. (2016). Talkie: Kirsten Johnson. Retrieved 13 October 2020, from http://www.reverseshot.org/videos/video-entries/2234/kirstenjohnson

Johnson, K. (2016). Cameraperson [Film]. USA: Kirsten Johnson.

Lazic, E. (2016). How Others Perceive Us: Kirsten Johnson on “Cameraperson”. Retrieved 13 October 2020, from http://moviemezzanine.com/cameraperson-essay/

Wilkinson, A. (2017). Cameraperson is a movie, a memoir, and a confession. Retrieved 13 October 2020, from https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/2/7/14525500/cameraperson-kirsten-johnson-augu stine-confession