CAMERAPERSON B
USA (102 mi) 2016
d: Kirsten Johnson
These are the images
that have marked me and leave me wondering still.
—Kirsten Johnson
A collection of random outtake scenes shot by a documentary cinematographer
over the course of 25 years, all strung together in an impressionistic mosaic,
like fragmented memories, identified only by the place where the footage takes
place, listed in intertitles on a black background, becoming a memoir and a comprehensive
essay on the ethics of cinematography, having shot footage in films such as Laura
Poitras’s Citizenfour
(2014), Kirby Dick’s 2012
Top Ten Films of the Year: # 5 The Invisible War, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), and Raoul Peck’s
Profit & Nothing But! Or Impolite
Thoughts on the Class Struggle (2001), among others. Kirsten Johnson is a New Yorker who graduated
from Brown University in 1987 with a BA in Fine Arts and Literature, spending
two years in West Africa on documentary film projects before attending FEMIS
(the French National Film School) in Paris, graduating in 1994 from the
cinematography department. While she has
earned a reputation for stellar documentation in other people’s films, this is
one of her first films that gives voice to her own artistic expression,
becoming a meditation on the art of shooting documentary subjects. By showcasing dozens of scenes from other
documentaries, the film resembles Wim Wenders portrait of Brazilian
photojournalist Sebastião Salgado in 2015
Top Ten List #4 The Salt of the Earth, though each are uniquely different
artists, but they raise the question of permission and consent, especially in
harrowing regions around the world, as subjects rarely consent to being filmed,
leaving open the question of whether art exploits human tragedy. There is no question that images play a part
in educating human consciousness, as certain images from the Vietnam War
continue to haunt us literally decades after the war has ended, the Zapruder
tape capturing the assassination of JFK, the first images shot by men from the
moon, blacks being subjected to firehoses and attack dogs in the Civil Rights
struggles in the South, or the brutal beating of Rodney King at the hands of LA
police officers. These are part of the
worldwide images stored deep in the recesses of our own subconscious that
reflect a collective humanity, or lack thereof, as some in war-torn regions may
be inundated by little more than war, poverty, starvation, death, and
trauma.
Like a scrapbook of memories, the film resembles a photo
album, yet in each segment the participants mysteriously come to life as we
travel around the globe visiting places like Bosnia, Darfur, Kosovo,
Afghanistan, a secret prison in Yemen, a church in Rwanda, a maternity ward in
Nigeria, a courtroom in Texas, and of course her mother’s sheep ranch in
Wyoming. Initially the film feels random
and haphazard, with no real rhyme or reason, viewing her mother and children in
her childhood home, but also including landscape shots of an approaching storm,
where behind the image we hear a cough, presumably from the person shooting the
footage, drawing the viewer’s attention to the woman behind the camera. In this way she exposes herself as a living
force behind the images, as the film explores the extent to which she remains
personally invested, questioning the decisions she has made throughout her
career, like how close should cameras squeeze in on people recalling traumas
that have obviously left emotional scars, how long to hold a shot before it
becomes invasive, what specific details are considered too personal, does she
need to establish a rapport with subjects before shooting, and what about non
cooperative subjects who are alleged to have committed criminal acts? With her imprint all over this footage, it
begins to appear less random after a while and more personal, especially her
self-described “montage of horror,” when suddenly more detail is provided that
identifies what happened in some of these places, where context means
everything, especially a stream of places that were the sites of horrific human
atrocities, where civilians were executed in horrific war crimes, such as the
town of Foča, a city targeted by the Serbs during the Bosnian War, where ethnic
cleansing led to massacres and mass rapes, as we see what was the police
headquarters, now the site of children playing ping-pong, and the Sports Hall
where women were imprisoned and raped, as we hear rape victims point out the
motels used by military forces to rape women, followed by a pickup truck in
Jasper, Texas that was used by three men, two avowed white supremists, to drag a
black man, James Byrd Jr., for three miles to his death in 1988, dumping his
severed torso in a nearby black cemetery.
The Texas District Attorney shows us the chain that was used in the
crime while describing the importance of viewing gruesome photographs that
captured the harrowing evidence, raising the significance of photography to
bear visual witness to particularly heinous acts, as without it, many would
refuse to believe the severity of what happened. What follows are images shot from a car of a heavily
protected, secret Al-Qaeda prison facility in Sana’a, Yemen, putting the taxi
driver at risk by asking if they could get “closer,” while similar footage
appears of torture chambers at Guantánamo, Tahrir Square in Cairo, where more
than 900 civilians have been killed since 2011, Nyamata Church in Rwanda where
10,000 Tutsis were massacred, also Wounded Knee and Ground Zero at the World
Trade Center, places where images merge with history.
Perhaps it comes as no surprise that Johnson began her
career in 1997 shooting over 200 interviews with Holocaust survivors for the
Shoah Foundation, as personal an experience as one can imagine when asking the
elderly to relive their worst horrors.
While she is practiced in the sensitive art of filming women who have
experienced trauma, especially rape victims in Bosnia and the U.S. Armed
Forces, where much of her skill is building a trust with the most vulnerable,
one of the moral dilemmas is asking them to open up their lives for the world
to see while she remains safely concealed behind the camera. One of the most affecting scenes takes place
in a hospital at Kano, Nigeria where the camera observes a midwife attempt to
bring an emaciated newborn who is not breathing to life in an unbroken yet prolonged
shot, where you can even hear Johnson gasp at one point when the baby’s
survival could depend on medical equipment that was not working at the time,
yet the midwife goes through extensive maneuvers to move the baby around in
different positions, including upside down, patting him on the back until
miraculously he starts breathing, but barely has a pulse. The midwife explains “He needs oxygen
now. And we don’t have oxygen in the
clinic.” Nonetheless, she wraps him in
warm blankets and delivers oxygen manually through some kind of man-made device,
giving him the help he needs in his first precious moments of life. In Bosnia, a scene inadvertently veers into
horror, as a young boy is playing with an axe, swinging it just inches from his
younger brother’s face, an inquisitive toddler who is left on his own to
explore the possible dangers of a sharp-edged instrument, a scene Johnson films
with palpable anxiety. In Zalingei,
Darfur, two women whose homes were stolen by armed Arab militants secretly ask
the person behind the camera if she might intervene in getting them back before
returning to their habit of chopping down dead trees for firewood, as the
Arabs, who they call Bastards, won’t let them anywhere near the forests, as
they’ll forcefully kick them out.
Johnson’s camera was at Penn State at the site of the first football
game after sex abuse charges were announced that considerably tarnished the
school’s legacy, yet her camera finds the cheerleaders leading the student
section in a male chorus singing of the Penn State Alma Mater, “For the glory
of old State,” and in Brooklyn, New York at a Golden Glove boxing match where a
split decision leaves a young boxer painfully distraught, with Johnson voyeuristically
trailing behind his every move as he punches walls in disgust, screams in
agony, and calls foul, fretting like a cornered animal before realizing he’s
still being filmed, so she follows him stalking back out of the dressing room
and into the arena where the camera finds him sobbing in the arms of his
mother. Johnson follows the story of one
of the few Muslim families returning to Bosnia years after the war, seen
pleasantly growing coffee and picking blueberries, with the filmmaker returning
5 years later to visit them, as despite the horrific memories of war crimes,
she had “pleasant” memories of this family, and they are happy to see her as
well, exchanging photos of children.
Among the more personal shots are brief scenes of Johnson’s own mother
who has been stricken with Alzheimer’s, seen surprised, uncertain who this strange
and mysterious person may be, later in a moment of recognition she’s seen
brushing her daughter’s hair, where we catch a glimpse of the filmmaker in the
mirror. Yet of all the stories
surrounding the film, one stands out, a lone elderly man who survived the
Rwandan massacres, who directed her down into a decrepit crypt of wooden
caskets in the mud, opening the caskets showing her the dead bodies, insisting
that she film it. He was like a guardian
of the graves that wanted the world to know what happened there. Johnson perhaps surprised herself to learn
afterwards that she kept her camera turned off, as some things are not meant to
be seen.
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