Cameraperson turned out to be a very strange experience for me. When we discuss film, we talk about the fourth wall or refer to "the camera" as an autonomous object. The character that looks directly at us is 'breaking the fourth wall; the camera can be 'uncomfortably close.' but with Cameraperson, there's an odd fifth element - the actual human behind the camera. This isn't a film about cinematography, it's a film about Kirsten Johnson, and the knowledge that there's someone (or multiple people) intending to shoot these things is sometimes very odd.
An image that describes this duplicity comes from a shoot in Afghantistan. Johnson is shooting through a car window, and as she's wiping away dust from her side, the driver is also cleaning the window on the other side, and we see both hands moving across the screen, wiping the same places without touching. It's a profound duplicity that's fascinating, but at some points uneasy; sometimes watching the film it feels uncomfortable to remember that there's someone making a conscious decision to shoot this and not act. From the beginning that intentionality is apparent; in an early segment in Bosnia we see Johnson, shooting a shepherd with his herd from the ground, pluck away some dead grass that;s in the way of the shot.
As a memoir, the knowledge of Johnson behind the camera is essential, and the parts that hit home the most are when she gets personal. Not just the parts with her parents or her children, but when she interacts with the people she's shooting; a woman having an abortion who Johnson asserts, that, despite what she's saying, she is not a bad person, documentarians on the Bosnian war who carry their own demons from covering it, Afghan soldiers who stop to have watermelon with her, only to be called out, a family she stays with in rural Bosnia who affect her so much that she returns to the latter five years later to show them the footage. More detached moments shooting people seem a bit uncomfortably ethnographic; depiction without interaction, associating things that belong to others only as they occurred to her. It's a fuzzy line, since of course she did experience being in these places, but without the emotional element it almost seems disingenuous to include it as a memoir.
Cameraperson is also about the broadness of life and death, both obliquely (a toddler left alone with an axe wedged into a stump) or directly (scenes from a birth clinic in Nigeria). The first segment in the birth clinic is a relatively unremarkable delivery of a baby. As the midwife wipes off the infant, she and Johnson both notice that the baby is looking directly at the camera. "She knows," the midwife says.
Much later in the film, Johnson shoots another delivery, which goes less well. It appears to be breech. There’s blood on the floor. The baby isn’t crying as the midwife whisks him out of the room. In the other room, the baby gasps practically with its entire body, struggling to breathe. The midwife tries suction and other methods, and although the baby gets a few cries out, it’s clear that it can barely breathe.
“He needs oxygen,” the midwife explains, “but we don’t have oxygen here.” She leaves. The baby is still gasping for air, its milky eyes looking towards the camera. This baby is dying, and if the first baby knew it was being viewed, doesn’t this one? We’re not just watching an infant suffocate, we’re watching someone watching an infant suffocate. It’s an intentional choice by a real person, a person who we now know, and I can’t help but dwell on that moment. There's a speech by a Syrian professor earlier that pinpoints why some of these moments are so uneasy. He talks about the images of corpses of refugees, how showing them is a sensationalist and exploitative act that demeans who these people were.
Sometimes, I watch a movie with something that really disturbs me, and I get upset at the actual filmmaker for subjecting me to it. (The unrelenting child abuse and suicides in Farewell My Concubine, for example.) Until now it always seemed irrational, just an outlet to take off some of the emotional burden. But perhaps it’s less silly than I thought; there’s always a person behind the camera who chose to record this. There’s no real way I can rate Cameraperson; I had more of a realization than a reaction, but it’s definitely something unique and notable.
