Kirsten Johnson’s talent as a documentary cinematographer often has us empathizing with her subjects, feeling their joy, triumph of the human spirit and oftentimes unspeakable tragedy.
Now in her highest profile directorial endeavor to date, the documentary simply titled Cameraperson, Johnson casts an empathetic eye not only on these people and their stories but also on herself, providing a glimpse of the moral dilemmas, emotional highs and lows experienced by a cinematographer both personally and professionally.
Debuting to plaudits at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Cameraperson is a tapestry of footage captured by Johnson as a cinematographer over the span of a 25-year-and-still-counting career, working with such directors as Laura Poitras on Citizenfour (2004) and The Oath (2010), Michael Moore on Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), Ted Braun on Darfur Now (2007), Amir Bar-Lev on Happy Valley (2014), Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick on Derrida (2002), and many more. Actual snippets as well as outtakes are shared in Cameraperson, a personal memoir that becomes even more personal with the inclusion of family footage capturing Johnson’s children, father. and Alzheimer’s-stricken mother.
In winning the Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 2016 San Francisco Film Festival, Cameraperson elicited a jury statement which read, “We honor Cameraperson for its compassion and curiosity; for its almost tangible connection to subjects and humble acknowledgment of its own subjectivity; for its singular enfolding of memoir, essay and collage; for its perfect expression of the vital collaboration between director and editor; and for its disarming invitation for us to participate in the meaning and construction of the work, and by extension the meaning and construction of documentary cinema itself.”
Sans narration, Cameraperson gives us a taste of what a cinematographer grapples with, which often entails a delicate balancing act—observing, capturing intensely personal, intimate feelings yet staying professionally detached.
Genesis
Cameraperson originated in 2009 when Johnson went to Afghanistan for what was to be a documentary about a school for women and girls. The resulting interviews were deemed too dangerous to the subjects and the project didn’t come to fruition. Still, Johnson got to know two Afghan teenagers and she began shooting footage of them for a film that carried the working title The Blind Eye. A cut of the The Blind Eye was brought to Sundance’s editing lab in 2015; there the project was expanded to include footage from more than 30 films shot by Johnson, touching upon the themes of human rights, surveillance and the right to be—or not to be—filmed. Initially this was fashioned into what the production team called “the trauma cut,” featuring violent, horrific imagery from the impoverished and war torn locales where Johnson had shot. While this accurately reflected the situations encountered, Johnson felt the film didn’t reflect her overall experience as a cameraperson, especially on a personal level.
She then approached editor Nels Bangerter whose work includes Let the Fire Burn (2013), a documentary consisting exclusively of found footage, to help her complete her film. They brainstormed, resulting in the inclusion of family footage as well as other documentaries such as Fahrenheit 9/11, providing a more fully realized portrayal of Johnson and her life’s work.
Johnson collaborated with both Bangerter and co-editor Amanda Laws on Cameraperson. Johnson said of the editors, “They helped me see myself through my own work over the years—as a woman at different ages and moments. As a cinematographer, you stay detached but you feel emotional pain. You let yourself fall into someone else’s world. You never put yourself in the footage. You construct this world for the audience. Yet in doing all this, work in which you don’t appear, you find—as I did through this film—so much about yourself, how you deal with the violence and tragedy you are shooting, the ethical dilemmas implicit in the work, the decisions you make to help tell the story, and how you are impacted by what you shoot. You begin to recognize the blind spots you had about yourself. You find evidence of yourself in the footage that I wouldn’t have otherwise imagined to be true.”
Such self-described “blind spots” are a survival mechanism of sorts. “It’s how we manage all the terrible information we take in,” said Johnson who cites for example the documentary Two Towns of Jasper (2002) which she lensed for directors Whitney Dow and Marco Williams. The documentary delves into the murder of James Byrd Jr. by three men, at least two of whom were white supremacists, in Jasper, Texas. Byrd was chained to a pickup truck and dragged for three miles over asphalt roads to his death. In Cameraperson we see scenes in the Texas courtroom where the murderers were tried. A prosecutor describes the crime and we see several trial exhibits. The sight of those heavy metal chains and Byrd’s ravaged, torn clothes is powerful beyond words, underscoring what both the cinematographer and her audience experience.
As for what drives her work, which can be simultaneously painful and gratifying, Johnson points to what led to her career path to begin with—”the desire to do something about the clear injustices of the world.”
