Reevaluating Documentary Aesthetics: Kirsten Johnson's Cameraperson (review)

Kirsten Johnson's Cameraperson (2016) blends different documentary aesthetics into one seemingly impenetrable collage. Cameraperson combines camera footage from Johnson's twenty-five years as a cinematographer, stitching together ethnographic work from documentaries focusing on social conflicts and war zones, personal travelogues, and rather sensitive home footage. The film attempts to (re) evaluate the implications of using a camera to document the world and mediate one's position within it equally on the personal and the social-ethical levels.

Johnson's deep and varied color palette is perhaps the film's greatest virtue. Whether it be on-the-move fieldwork shots or highly formalist photography, the cinematographic design in all cases appears consistent, evoking a range of shades from deep blues and mute reds to earthy browns and pale greens. This is particularly refreshing, considering the film gathers decades' worth of footage, and thus assimilating that footage to gain meaningful visual continuity is perhaps most difficult. The texture of the surfaces represented in the film also infuses it with a sense of immediacy and wonder, recovering it from sequences of prolonged philosophizing. We see a smiling, wrinkly old Bosnian grandmother bake bread. The flour fills the air, and the molding of the dough unfolds, the scattering of particles reverberating far off the screen.

While the film's colors, cinematography, and texture are its strong suit, its frequent associative editing and the meanings engendered therein are less subtle, often feeling stale and obvious. One reoccurring juxtaposition is that of modernity and tradition, poverty and wealth. Case in point: a shot in a Muslim temple shows a modern fan that stands out from the ancient architecture, followed by a shot of covered people praying. We then switch to the United States. We see a kind of new age gathering of young girls, who dance around a white modern cross. The spatiotemporal shift conveys different types of shifts: between a traditional house of prayer and a new age gathering, the so-called Developing World and the Developed World. By being reductive in terms of juxtaposition, the film's means of representation often take away some of the impact of the object of representation. The Criterion release of the film is useful, as the set includes a supplementary documentary feature on the editing of the film (Editing Cameraperson) as well as Johnson's writing, which can help the viewer unfamiliar with Johnson's work get to know in more detail her narratorial intentions and her approach to documentary form.

Figure 1.

Foča, Bosnia, image used in Cameraperson, sourced from the documentary Women, War, and Peace: "I Came to Testify" (2011).

Photo courtesy of The Criterion Collection.

It is worth saying that, while the writing is informative, it lacks depth. For instance, in the "Director's Statement," though Johnson makes a specific statement about the weight carried by the presence of the cameraperson ("I shift the balance of power by my very presence"), she also offers a more generalist claim about the impact of the camera in the digital age as capable of being turned on the world by anyone, anywhere ("political repression, censorship, and the possibility of worldwide distribution of images filmed by any individual on the planet affect all of us and our relation to filming in shifting and unprecedented ways"). Given that her statement is as much about her theory as her practice and that, throughout, she places emphasis on the artistic freedom afforded by the camera, Johnson does very little to actually explicate the role of the cameraperson, to distinguish, for instance, the artist, the artisan, and the pedestrian. Though these differences may go unnoticed in the light of her flashy associations, they represent glaring gaps in her thought, given that precisely those differences, in terms of who operates the camera, will determine the aesthetic content and, more importantly, how that content is framed. Making those distinctions is an essential step if one, especially a filmmaker, plans to...