853 Cameraperson

[doh286]

Cameraperson



A boxing match in Brooklyn; life in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina; the daily routine of a Nigerian midwife; an intimate family moment at home with the director: Kirsten Johnson weaves these scenes and others into her film Cameraperson, a tapestry of footage captured over her twenty-five-year career as a documentary cinematographer. Through a series of episodic juxtapositions, Johnson explores the relationships between image makers and their subjects, the tension between the objectivity and intervention of the camera, and the complex interaction of unfiltered reality with crafted narrative. A work that combines documentary, autobiography, and ethical inquiry, Cameraperson is a moving glimpse into one filmmaker's personal journey and a thoughtful examination of what it means to train a camera on the world.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED EDITION:

• New high-definition digital master, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Making "Cameraperson," a new program featuring director Kirsten Johnson, producers Marilyn Ness and Danielle Varga, and editors Nels Bangerter and Amanda Laws
• In the Service of the Film, a roundtable conversation with Johnson, producer Gini Reticker, and sound recordists Wellington Bowler and Judy Karp
• Excerpts from two 2016 film festival talks with Johnson, including one between her and filmmaker Michael Moore
• The Above, a 2015 short film by Johnson
• Trailer
• PLUS: An essay by filmmaker Michael Almereyda and reprinted writings by Johnson

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

Janus has acquired the rights to Kirsten Johnson's documentary Cameraperson.

I never try to link to the Huffington Post, but here's the trailer for Cameraperson

[domino harvey]

Coming in February

[Never Cursed]

Beaverperson

[swo17]

The Above, a 2015 short film by Johnson

Well here's your best bonus film of 2017, people--a dazzling display of things that go up, enshrouded in government intrigue. I kind of wish the main feature had been as visually inventive, but I suppose we can't have everything.

[movielocke]

The editing of Cameraperson is just so great I'm still kind of processing the degree of achievement. It so seamlessly moves back and forth between such a disparate set of materials, often by finding serendipitous graphic matches, but just as often by finding impressive thematic matches.

Sure the imagery is often amazing, as is the content, but the way it is edited together is simply a spectacular display of skill. I'm a little in awe.

[knives]

I really love the premise here which is so philosophically compelling that the fact the the film is rather stream of conscious about it with a straight forward aesthetic doesn't matter all that much. The highlight of this, before I bother to explain is an early discussion by Derrida followed by a montage proving his point. This idea, to simply summarize what Johnson herself says at the beginning is to make an autobiography, but replacing the verbal narration typical of such things (i.e. Jonas Mekas) with a visual education of incident. We aren't told stories about Johnson or given a narrative with which to thematically tie together the film to make it a unique page in her life. Instead we see through her eyes things she saw that are interesting to her. That she finds it interesting is basically what the biographical elements come in. What makes someone who experienced 25 years of incident decide these are the interesting things and thus we get a sense of the character of Kirsten Johnson in near exclusion of the person herself. It's an experiment I would like to see more of in part because it prevents the egotistical David Holzman type narratives that must documentary autobiographies fall into (it's a testament to Mekas' talent that this has never happened to him).

It also plays in an interesting way to the theory of direct cinema and is probably the first major addition to that as an artform since the '70s. The film goes out of its way to avoid being cinema verite for the most part, but the subjects of the direct cinema constantly acknowledge the camera which begs the question of if the traditional view of direct cinema as an uncertainty principle is false since outside of the vantage point of the told version of events the uncertainty dissipates to a plain understanding that the camera is on and the performance is ongoing (admittedly Allan King said just as much forty years ago, but he never really set out to prove it in one of his films). This makes it shocking when a third of the way through Johnson takes us out of the impersonal observance of direct cinema into the a personal realm that won't allow it. The previous methodology of autobiography is proven as a defense away from honesty and yet she didn't need to include it.