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For the documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson, like many people, life is tied up inextricably with her job. The difference is that Johnson's footage serves as a journal, one that she compiles into "Cameraperson," a fascinating visual memoir.
Johnson has traveled the world, shooting documentaries for directors such as Laura Poitras, Kirby Dick and Michael Moore. She has been to former war zones, current refugee camps, underfunded hospitals, courthouses, abortion clinics and other locations. The footage in "Cameraperson" takes her to Bosnia, Rwanda, Nigeria, Sudan, Liberia, Myanmar, Yemen and many locations in the United States.
The people she interviews have experienced or seen horrors. She meets a Muslim farm family in Bosnia who talk about returning after the ethnic cleansing that killed many of the Muslims living in the country. She talks to an Afghan teen who describes how he lost the sight in one eye. She interviews a prosecutor in Jasper County, Texas, about the case of James Byrd Jr., the African-American man who was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck.
Johnson captures moments tied to major news events. She was on the field at Penn State's first football game after revelations of the child sex-abuse scandal that rocked that campus. She gets a surreptitious shot of a Yemen jail where the CIA has housed Al-Qaeda prisoners. She shows, from an undisclosed location, one of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's USB drives being thrown into a cement mixer and becoming part of someone's sidewalk.
It's not all doom and gloom. Johnson is in the locker room for a Golden Gloves competition in Brooklyn. She follows midwives in a Nigerian hospital bringing new life into the world. And she's home, first with her Alzheimer's-addled mother on her Wyoming ranch, and later with her twin children exploring in their grandfather's yard in Washington state.
Through all the footage, some patterns emerge to give this movie its shape. Johnson is devoted to telling stories of the unheard, but also mindful that the act of filming can change the relationship between subject and chronicler — and can change, or possibly threaten, the life of her subject.
Johnson also is aware of the paradox of trying to chronicle lives while living her own. In one clip, she's following the French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida (for Kirby Dick's 2002 documentary on him) when she nearly trips on a New York curb. "She sees everything but is totally blind," Derrida comments, comparing her to the philosopher who falls into a well while looking at the stars.
In "Cameraperson," Johnson beautifully captures her odd life, finding in these disparate stories of other people a through-line to her own life as an observer who never forgets her own humanity. She manages, through the juxtaposition of the global and the personal, to show us both the well and the stars.
Twitter: @moviecricket —
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'Cameraperson'
In this fascinating film, a documentary cinematographer uses her work to explain what she does and who she is.
Where • Broadway Centre Cinemas.
When • Opens Friday, Oct. 14.
Rating • Not rated, but probably R for descriptions of war, sexual assault and other violence.
Running time • 102 minutes.