Having lost the match, a distraught young boxer storms through the changing room, swearing and punching at inanimate objects. Watching his frustration, it’s impossible not to fear for the safety of the person behind the camera.
However, that person is Kirsten Johnson, the remarkable cinematographer behind such fearless fare as Fahrenheit 9/11, Citizenfour, Darfur Now and This Film Is Not Yet Rated. She tracks the young pugilist until the shot takes us somewhere that is as moving as it is unexpected.
This Brooklyn-set sequence provides one narrative thread of Cameraperson, a feature film composed mostly of outtakes from the award-winning cinematographer's previous work. Johnson's "memoir" unfolds as a travelogue that touches down in such far-flung locations as a maternity hospital in Nigeria, Sana'a al-Qaeda detention centre in Yemen, a Muslim farm in Bosnia, and a courtroom in Texas.
“These are the scenes that I have shot that have stayed with me,” says Johnson. “What I discovered going back over the footage that I’ve shot over two decades is that I can absolutely recognise the eyes of every single person that I’ve shot. I see them and I know.”
For all its disparate subjects and themes, Cameraperson quickly coalesces into a remarkable and rigorous deconstruction of the documentary itself, a self-reflexivity that plays with music, content and composition.
“If you had told me that my memoir was going to start with an out-of-focus shot of dirt, I would never in a million years have believed you,” laughs Johnson. “I kept holding on to ego and I wanted to start with some beautiful shot. But I had a great editor in Nels Bangerter. He was wise.
“We both agreed that the audience is capable of getting everything; it’s up to us to share the tools. So we decided we had to establish a physical presence – my body – in that first shot. Just so you know I’m there.”
Johnson herself is glimpsed only occasionally, but she remains remarkably present in smaller details, such as a handwritten prayer dating back to her childhood in a Seventh Day Adventist family in Washington state, and grander gestures, including footage of her mother, taken three years after the latter’s diagnosis with Alzheimer’s.
“I don’t ever feel hidden behind the camera, especially now that the equipment is lighter,” she says. “I always feel very physically present. I’m friendly. I’m playful. I’m there.”
Johnson describes movie-making as "a series of betrayals of your own principles", and almost every chapter of Cameraperson plays out as ethical wrangling.
Permission denied
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the idea for the film sprang from a dilemma. In 2012, an Afghanistan teenager decided, some three years into a production, to retract her permission to be filmed.
“I was blindsided by it,” says Johnson. “She was fully on-board and she understood the risks she was taking. But then she changed as a person, and the technology changed. So one of the last places in the world that wasn’t touched by the internet and smartphones suddenly had both.”
Johnson’s subsequent self- questioning has produced a film that plays like an urgent antidote to an era characterised by obsessive self-chronicling.
“I come from a period in time when not everybody had a camera,” she says. “That’s obviously still true in some parts of the world. But I did want to show evidence of the time before. One of the ethical challenges of film- making is figuring out why is this person allowing themselves to be filmed, and how much they know about possible consequences if they let themselves be filmed?
“In one sense, we live in a world where they is more informed consent that there has been. People are more aware of how film might make them famous or notorious or seen in only one light. But this is still an important issue.”
Kirsten Johnson graduated from Rhode Island’s Brown University in 1987 with a BA in fine arts and literature. Entranced by the cinema of Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambéty, she travelled to west Africa to work on film projects and to Paris, where she honed her craft at La Fémis (the French National Film School). She graduated from the cinematography department in 1994.
Senegalese cinema
“I was really taken with Senegalese film,” Johnson recalls. “The fullness of Sembène’s cinema was so different from anything I had seen. It articulated Senegalese culture with such humour and visual style. It was like a signal to other human beings. A flare: ‘I’m here in all of my specificity’.”
It can be hard to square Johnson's warm, smiling presence with a CV characterised by genocide and geopolitical skulduggery. In common with its originator Cameraperson teams with life. Tellingly, the film is prefaced with a dedication that ends "With Love, KJ".
“I definitely wanted to present it with tenderness,” says the film- maker. “I really do feel like giving love. I have good memories of all of the people I have filmed. And I wanted them to know that they still matter to me.”
Cameraperson premieres on Friday at the IFI Documentary Film Festival. See ifi.ie
