Nope. It’s going somewhere. And the destination is worth any effort the journey may require. This is the kind of film that makes you see other movies through fresh eyes and ask questions that might not normally occur to you during films that try to hide their storytelling seams.
The film begins with footage of Johnson trying to get just the right shot of a shepherd on horseback in rural Bosnia, then continues on to show us scene after scene that seems, on first glance, to be only tangentially connected to everything around it: an old Bosnian woman coyly accepting a compliment on her stylish clothes and indicating that she’s lived a very happy, mostly uneventful life; a young African-American woman in an abortion clinic talking about her decision to terminate her pregnancy; Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, crossing a New York street while telling the camera crew about “the image of the philosopher who falls in the well while looking at the stars”; a passenger jet’s shadow gliding along the tarmac, as seen through a passenger’s window; Johnson and a director trying to observe the exterior of an Al Qaeda detention facility in Yemen without arousing police suspicion. (“I’ll tell them it’s cinema, it’s a movie,” says the driver’s off-screen voice.)
But at a certain point—you’ll know it when you see it—the movie’s narrative strategy clicks into place, and you feel (perhaps before consciously realizing it) that this is not merely a collection of the director’s favorite moments from a career that took her to nations wracked by war, deprivation and oppression, and into her family’s past, and her present as a working mother employed in a field that demands a lot of travel.
This is not just one movie, it’s five, maybe six, maybe more, rolled into one.
For starters, “Cameraperson” is an autobiography of sorts—a life in filmed fragments that almost never shows the face of its main character, Kirsten Johnson, but spends a fair amount of screen time watching her mother succumb to Alzheimer’s disease. These heartbreaking moments connect with footage of Johnson’s two children. Watching them grow up, we might wonder if Johnson will one day lose her memory as well, and if these images may one day serve as a substitute for actual, physical memory—the stories that a parent is no longer able to tell a child. We may also notice that the seeming-randomness of this film’s construction is an analogy for how it feels to try to remember a life when one’s mind has been fragmented by disease, or simply by age. Maybe the movie is an analogy for how almost anyone’s mind works, even in mint condition: remembrance is not linear, it jumps around.
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