Sundance Film Review: ‘Cameraperson’
variety.comNick Schager Film CriticA nonfiction collage that plumbs the complicated relationship between filmmaker and subject, “Cameraperson” finds cinematographer Kirsten Johnson assembling snippets from her past works in order to evoke an assortment of intricate, uneasily resolved questions.
The person behind the camera for “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “Darfur Now” and “Citizenfour” (among many others), Johnson has made a decades-long career out of traveling the globe for stories that uncover hidden truths — a modus operandi reflected in her backward gaze, seeking the larger threads uniting the images and moments that continue to affect her.
Without narration or a conventional storyline, it’s a uniquely insightful memoir-cum-critical-treatise that, after its Sundance premiere, should garner substantial attention from the documentary crowd.Aside from opening text that explains the diary-like nature of the project, “Cameraperson” offers little overt context regarding its intentions, instead diving headfirst into snapshot after snapshot from Johnson’s earlier films.
Those clips are identified not by title but by location, and range from a Brooklyn arena locker room filled with aspiring young boxers, to a Nigerian hospital where a midwife struggles to deliver babies with minimal resources, to a Bosnian farm inhabited by one of the few Muslim families to return to the country after the genocide, to an Alabama women’s clinic and an Afghanistan Ferris wheel, to the U.S.
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