CAPSULE: Cameraperson (2016, Dir. Kirsten Johnson)

Had I seen Kirsten Johnson's collage-memoir documentary, Cameraperson when it played at MIFF last year, it may well had featured in my review of Gianfranco Rosi's Fire at Sea. Both films use cinematic image to interrogate ideas beyond what they are showing on the screen. Though where Rosi uses images captured in the service of his world view, Johnson's is drawn directly from that world view, with images collected from her two decades looking at the world from behind a camera.

Cameraperson, then, is an exercise in open-ended curation. A life's survey that, given Johnson's range of subjects over the years (Liberia, Kabul, Bosnia, the rural United States, and her own home life), manages to interrogate conflict, survival and the bond of family.

As broad as those themes may seem, they barely encompass the breadth of Cameraperson's purview. With the knowledge that Johnson is behind the camera, something usually only signalled by her voice or a hand reaching out to clear a shot of distraction, the concept of the subjectivity of image is foregrounded. The film becomes a museum of her loves and her pains, or at least a catalogue of her reaction to the loves and the pains of others, of which she has seen much.

There is more to be drawn from these offcuts of life, both in their description of the world and in the mere fact that they have been selected for inclusion and placed where they have been placed. To delve deeper is to discover more of Johnson and the act of observing from behind a camera, of recording the world but only tangentially influencing it.

A fascinating and endlessly illuminating experience.

★★★★

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