Arts & Events

Opens September 30 at the Shattuck Landmark

Cameraperson, filmmaker Kirsten Johnson's self-styled "memoir," is like an album of old photos (or a family member's summer vacation slideshow—anyone old enough to remember those?) but enhanced with sound and the added dimension of time.

The title, Cameraperson, is Johnson's jibe at yet another male-centric industry. All too often, "cameraman" is the title that women filmmakers are forced to bear. This film will help change that.

"The joys of being a documentary cameraperson are obvious and endless," Johnson writes, "I get to share profound intimacy with the people I film, pursue remarkable stories, be at the center of events as they unfold, travel, collaborate, and see my work engage the world."

Over the past 25 years, Johnson has racked up an impressive resume, providing cinematography for films like Michael Moore's Farhrenheit 9/11 and CItizenfour, the powerful, award-winning documentary profiling NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

 

 

 

It could be argued that a self-curated smorgasbord of a filmmaker's "best moments" is inherently self-aggrandizing. But Johnson's career (reflected in a wide variety of globe-spanning assignments) justifies this retrospective. 

The snippets intentionally come complete with loose ends. Scenes that start with an unsteady camera being positioned on a tripod are soon disrupted as the camera is picked up and carried to a new position. These moments could have been edited out but they were retained to underscore the practical—and occasionally ragged—roots of the image-making process. 

At the same time, thanks to the filmmaker's keen eye and steady tripod, many of Johnson's images could stand alone as exceptional still photos. 

The raw footage also contains raw sounds, recorded in-the-moment. The unedited background noise includes the rustle of wind, the barking of unseen dogs, and the sounds of the filmmaker herself—breathing hard after a camera-hugging run, gasping in delight, giggling to herself, and exchanging words with the people she's filming. 

By its very nature, Cameraperson is a hodge-podge of a film. Its vignettes hop-scotch around the world, bouncing from one venue to the next without rhyme, reason, or any clear sense of narrative or thematic direction. So don't try to navigate the flood: just go with the flow. 

Johnson's collection of "best moments" begins with the chance encounter in Bosnia as an old shepherd appears, balanced on his pony as he guides a colony of sheep down a country road. 

This is followed by an expansive scene in which a thin ribbon of asphalt underlines a green landscape immobilized beneath the visual weight of an immense, cloud-filled sky. The shot lasts for many minutes during which almost nothing happens. A single car grinds by, headed down the road until it disappears in the distance. Eventually, a second car comes and goes. 

Is that all there is? Just wait. Suddenly, from out of nowhere, a brilliant twist of lightning breaks loose and stabs the landscape. It is a stunning and awesome moment caught on film and captured in time. A brief pause and the thunder arrives, filling the soundtrack. A moment's pause and the clip ends with an unexpected but perfectly human coda: the sound of the filmmaker sneezing twice in the cold air. 

In the US, Johnson visit's Wounded Knee; in Egypt, Tahrir Square; in Liberia, Hotel Africa, a site of executions during the civil war. Her camerawork takes us to Afghanistan, Bosnia, Colombia, Liberia, Myanmar, Nigeria, Sudan, Uganda, Yemen, Manhattan and Brooklyn. 

At one stop in the Balkans, a statue of a prayerful Madonna bows her head in a church. Behind the statue, a brick wall appears to be splattered with patches of blood. 

We meet Bosnian survivors of Serb ethnic cleansing. 

We watch media censorship enforced on Johnson while covering a trial at the Pentagon's Guantanamo Bay prison. We hear the voices of government minders as they force her to erase images of certain parts of Gitmo. 

There's a remarkable interview with an unwed teen from Alabama trying to deal with the impact of an unwanted pregnancy. The interview is made more powerful by the fact that we only hear her tormented voice as the camera focuses on her hands, twisting helplessly in her lap. 

There is a grim meeting with prosecutors in a county evidence room as they display the evidence (torn clothing and a long, bloodied chain) used to convict the man who killed James Byrd Jr., by dragging him to his death behind a pick-up truck. 

Michael Moore appears in front of the US Capitol with a young marine who explains how the military "gave us a Media Card that pretty much tells you what you can and cannot say to the media. Basically, you can't say anything bad about the military." (So much for the myth that our soldiers are "fighting for our freedoms.") 

Cpl. Abdul Henderson, tells Moore he will refuse orders to return to Iraq for another tour of duty. Instead, he's prepared to face imprisonment. "I will not let anyone send me over there to kill other poor people—especially when they pose no threat to me or my country." 

Over the course of this 102-minute film, Johnson's clips keep returning to Bosnia, including visits to the numerous enslavement and mass-rape sites. 

War crimes investigators Johnson interviews raise the issue of "human rights PTSD." "Once you've heard thousands of stories [of murders and rapes] and put them inside of you," one strong but weary woman confides, "what is your channel to let it go?" 

Children are born in front of Johnson's camera. One newborn opens her eyes and stares directly—and curiously—into Johnson's lens as she draws her first breaths. We watch as a Nigerian baby, delivered lifeless, is resuscitated by a patient nurse calmly standing in a pool of his mother's placental blood. 

We meet the filmmaker's twins. And we watch Johnson's aging mother as she slowly sinks, beyond reach, into the shuffling confusion of Alzheimers. 

Late in Cameraperson, Johnson returns to Bosnia to visit a Muslim family she met five years earlier. The encounter provides a warm human moment as the family watches the movie they appeared in. (The children are especially amused to see five-years-younger versions of themselves on the screen.) Delighted that the American filmmaker remembered them, one woman expresses the hope that someday Johnson's own children will venture to Bosnia to visit the family in order "to see how peasants live." 

The final scene—filmed on a crowded street in a Monrovian marketplace in Liberia—is a wow-inducing panorama of sights and faces with Johnson's lens following first one profile, then another. As traffic blurs past in the foreground in a whirl of color, Johnson's camera fixes on different individuals who pop out from the crowd to capture the eye. It's a stunning accomplishment of "found art" caught, on-the-fly and served up in real time. 

Sometimes, the work doesn't make it to the screen. Johnson three spent years filming the lives of a pair of teenagers in Afghanistan only to scrub the project when one of the girls said she feared appearing on screen might put her life at risk. 

The list of people featured in the film ends with a poignant salute to "the people whose names I never learned." 

In the film's production notes, Johnson provides additional insight into the complex role of a documentary filmmaker. Here are some of Kirsten Johnson's thoughts about the challenges and frustrations of her work: 

• The people I meet are often in immediate and often desperate need, but I can offer little material assistance. 

• I can and will leave a place I film—whether a war or a refugee camp—while the people I film cannot.  

• I shift the balance of power by my very presence. 

• My work requires trust, intimacy and total attention. 

• I traffic in hope without the ability to know what will happen in the future. 

After watching Cameraperson, my only concern is that the success of Johnson's "memoir" may inspire others to start compiling collections of "best moments" from family vacation outings and patching them into feature-length compilations that friends and family will be invited to watch. (Were this to happen, a younger generation would finally experience the living hell of having to endure a modern incarnation of that dreaded late-20^th century bugaboo—the "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" slide show.)