Spend 25 years on any job and you’re bound to have a little down time. Kirsten Johnson has worked for decades as a cinematographer on many acclaimed documentaries, travelling to places such as Bosnia, Darfur, Kabul and Texas. Wisely, she always kept her camera running and didn’t throw away the spare footage. By collecting and curating “leftover stock” for her experimental film Cameraperson, she has made more than just a record of “what I did at the office”. It is a remarkable document about the creative process in the service of a specific goal. It may even tap into a richer vein: what it’s like to live on planet Earth.
Mostly a collection of scattered vignettes, Cameraperson differentiates itself from other grand “this is what the world is like” collages. Trailing a shepherd in rural Bosnia, Johnson chuckles as she positions herself for a good shot. The POV travels around a bit, until the camera is placed on the ground, in what looks like the right spot. Wait, there’s just one more thing to fix, as a hand appears from out of frame to pluck some pieces of grass. Perfect.
It’s likely the resulting image was incorporated for just a flash during a transition or patch-over moment. In a work about the horrors of war, it surely flew by barely noticed. But for an instant, the cameraperson was dialled-in, capturing a great image.
Later, Cameraperson is surveying a great field in Texas when lightning strikes. Again, who knows how the image was used in whichever film. In this version, though, we’re privy to Johnson’s surprised gasp. It’s a reminder that everything we see is first-person. As she travels the globe, we begin to better understand the personality taking these shots.
Much of the time, Johnson takes a fly-on-the-wall approach, but she is also there to guide interviewees, from courtroom attorneys to terrified young women at a health clinic.
The instinct to intervene has to be kept in check. While shooting a young boy playing with a hatchet on a farm, we hear Johnson clicking her tongue, and can almost sense how close she is to shouting, “No, no!” She is, after all, a mother of twins, whom we see during glimpses of her home life in New York – in stark contrast to her prowling an al-Qaida prison in Yemen.
The jumbled nature of Cameraperson is sure to have detractors. It has no discernible plot and it’s hard to defend against accusations that we’re just looking at all the junk that didn’t make it into other movies. (Is this cinema’s first attempt at the record industry’s old B-sides and rarities gambit?) But patterns do emerge. Struggles in the world’s hotspots mirror situations in the west, and Johnson connects them thematically and visually. (There is a mini-montage of long legs crossing thresholds.) To make the movie work, the audience needs to put in a little effort, but a philosophy of connectedness is present.
For those happy to ride shotgun during a remarkable travelogue, it’s no surprise that Cameraperson is extremely well shot.
