A free-form experiment that sees the filmmaker putting together a feature out of decades of behind-the-scenes footage from around the world—its fragmented moments of joy, anger, trauma and empathy reveal a common humanity even as they refuse to mark time and its deconstruction.
Review #2,964
Dir. Kirsten Johnson
2016 | USA | Documentary | 102min | 1.78:1 | English, Bosnian, Arabic & Dari
PG13 (passed clean) for some coarse language and mature content
Cast: –
Plot: Exposing her role behind the camera, Kirsten Johnson reaches into the vast trove of footage she has shot over decades around the world. What emerges is a visually bold memoir and a revelatory interrogation of the power of the camera.
Awards: –
Source: Janus Films
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Moderate – Decades of Filming; Human Stories; Around-the-world
Narrative Style: Free-form
Pace: Slightly Slow
Audience Type: Slightly Arthouse
Viewed: MUBI
Spoilers: No
If you had more than two decades of behind-the-scenes footage, shot in various countries in the world whilst working as a cinematographer for an array of projects, what would you do?
Kirsten Johnson finds a cathartic answer with Cameraperson, a free-form but wholly accessible effort that sees her putting together a feature made up of disparate montages that are bookmarked by location cards that tell us where we are but never when.
As such, Cameraperson goes beyond the need to mark things temporally (everything’s already in the past anyway) but instead centers on the people who inhabit their personal spaces with varying purposes and emotions.
From family videos of her dementia-stricken mother to a frustrated boxer who couldn’t accept the manner of his defeat, or several African women inefficiently trying to hack down a tree to families still reeling from the trauma of the Bosnian war, Johnson’s camera has seen it all.
“I can see you, I can see the camera… I can see everything.”
Her gaze, occasionally made explicit as she implicates herself as a filmmaker, is by turns curious and empathetic, no matter the subject.
Except for one clandestine shot of a USB stick thrown into a cement mixer—its undisclosed location surely a nod to her involvement as one of the DPs for the Oscar-winning Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour (2014).
Cameraperson could have been easily shrugged off as a lazy Sunday afternoon editing exercise, but Johnson’s carefree but thoughtful approach to depicting the human condition shines through in its fragmented moments.
They are so fleeting, so precious that they become the very embodiment of what the film refused to mark—time itself, and its deconstruction. Derrida, cheekily featured in a small segment, would have been proud.
Grade: A-
Trailer:
Eternality Tan 
[…] films like Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson (2016), which adopts a similar approach (i.e. unused footage from different projects shot over […]
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