Movie Forums Top 100 of the 2010s - Group Watch

Cameraman is a great film. Focusing on ephemeral moments, instead of a specific investigative line of inquiry, is what makes it special. Sometimes there are more interesting or beautiful or mysterious moments that happen between the story (kind of my entire philosophy towards narrative art), and this film gives them their due without forcing itself to answer what it all means in the grand scheme of things. It's frequently the grand scheme of things that blinds us to them, so I was happy as a pig in shit not to have to anchor all these images down to a specific purpose. Because yawn to that averageness.

(I'm about halfway through the film, but the portion I'm watching right now is very relevant to this comment).

I don't think it's just a release from the need to tie images to events, I think it's actively commenting on the way that objects or people become different to our eye when we do tie them to a narrative. I'm looking at a beautiful shot of some diving boards . . . and then three seconds later I learn that this is the site of mass executions by the Taliban. I think that this film is deliberately playing with the space where visuals/objects and stories intersect and I'm loving it.

That's similar to my opinion of the film. It's true that virtually all the episodes in the film are brief, so I can understand why someone may have difficulty connecting to them or may wish for the film to focus more on those individual stories. However, I think virtually every scene in this film is able to convey some kind of mood or emotional response from me without using that much historical context or background.

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That scene was chilling to watch for me. Speaking of which, I also loved the introduction of Johnson's mother where she seemed normal at first, suddenly started acting vaguely distant and unaware of her daughter's presence, and for text to come onscreen indicating she has Alzheimer's.

I seem to recall from the beginning of Dick Johnson is Dead (or being told at the beginning of Dick Johnson is Dead - sometimes I confuse what I remember from a movie with what people repeatedly tell me is in a movie), the reason JDiD was made was because when doing Camera Person, she discovered she just didn't have that much footage of her mother and didn't want to repeat that with her father.

I still need to see Camera Person. I don't think it'd be making my ballot so it's not an immediate priority of those movies I meant to squeeze in by the end of the month. That's what Thanksgiving is for, right?

Cameraperson, 2016

This documentary acts, per the director, as a kind of memoir of her life. The film takes footage--clips and outtakes--from the many films on which director Kirsten Johnson served as a cameraperson.

As I alluded to earlier, I really enjoyed this film. Despite seemingly being just a series of clips from Johnson's catalog of work, I thought that it brought out multiple interesting themes and ideas. It definitely kept me intellectually and emotionally engaged the entire way through.

A series of moments that carry a lot of resonance for me has to do with two different settings: the Bosnian documentary about the systematic violence against women, including captivity and rape, and the footage of the women's health clinic where we watch a midwife try to save a pair of twins, one of whom is being born breach.

Something that is explicitly called out by one of the women working as an investigator in the Bosnia film is the way that her work weighs on her. She knows that it is an important calling to help the women who have been victims of horrific sexual violence, but, as she puts it, she must then takes those stories inside of her. They haunt her, despite the importance of the work. Johnson doesn't need to say anything here, as the parallels with her own work are obvious. Johnson must continually bear witness to the pain of other people, and sometimes that pain finds an echo in her own life experiences. When a young woman breaks down describing her decision to have an abortion, the women in the room respond that "We've all had unplanned pregnancies." Later, in the health clinic, Johnson and her colleague are relieved when a baby in distress finally breathes and cries . . . only to clearly go into distress a short time later. There is this brief moment of hesitation before they go back into the room with the baby. There is a good chance that they may watch a baby suffocate because the clinic doesn't have the oxygen it needs to save his life. There is a price to bearing such witness, but it's something Johnson and her colleague do because it is important.

I appreciated the way that Johnson layered in a few moments like this: moments where the people she is filming are grappling with the very same emotional or ethical dilemmas that she herself faces. A man lectures about why it is wrong to show images of death in the media, arguing that it is voyeurism that also suggests that the chance for help is over. A student respectfully asks about a case where the image of a drowned child was a turning point in how the refugee crisis was perceived by the public. Where is the line that filming pain ceases to be useful and becomes voyeuristic? It's a question we see in small ways, such as when Johnson films as a young man is interviewed about having survived a serious attack in which he lost sight in one eye and watched his brother's head get torn apart. How much do you ask someone in that position? How much do you push?

And to add an even further layer, Johnson adds in footage of her own life, specifically her mother's decline into Alzheimer's disease. (Bonus points for footage of future star dad Dick Johnson!!). As with Dick Johnson is Dead, you get the sense that filming is how Johnson processes the world around her. She has an eye for little moments, such as following a woman with her camera only to get a great shot of that woman later turning to watch some action on the street. This shot turns into following two young women who are momentarily given a double look by a young man as they pass. The direction of the camera changes again to follow the exchange of money from hand to hand. This isn't just someone watching life through a camera lens---this is someone finding moments big and small. Other times, she simply captures amazing moments, such as when a friend has a breakdown about her mother's suicide and, as if in response, a thunder of snow falls from the roof of the house, plunging the room into temporary darkness.

This film was honestly also a strange trip down memory lane of some major events. It took my brain a moment to pull up the meaning of the name James Byrd, a case that horrified me at the time it happened. Something about watching the two men in the courtroom stretch out the chain that was used---the camera lingering on the way that the chain has dented and damaged the box in which it is stored---hit me in a really visceral way. Likewise some of the footage from the time of the Penn State child sex abuse scandal.

Another powerful takeaway for me from the film was one of the final sequences. Five years after filming the Bosnia documentary, Johnson returns to visit a family that lived in the mountains whom she interviewed at the time. Showing the family some of the finished film (or maybe just some of her footage of them?), she shares with them that despite the intensity of the subject matter, she has very happy memories of her time with them.

In terms of thinking about the ways that we bear witness to the lives of others, and the value and the trauma involved in being such a witness, I thought that this film was very impactful. It made me think a lot of some of the things I've witnessed or talked through with my students. I know how important it is to be there for them, but it can be hard sometimes because it is painful, even in cases where I am able to get them the help that they need.

I've been meaning to check this film out ever since watching (and loving) Dick Johnson is Dead. I might not love it as much as that film---which is one of the most innovative and memorable documentary-adjacent things I've seen in ages--but it was really great.

Exactly. It's not like narrative ceases to exist when we pull most of the standard markers away. Literally everything either has a story implicitly in it, or we can imply one. But when we are made to just step back and observe places and things and events, it changes how we relate to them. As well as the stories or sensations or history they almost certainly also contain. And as we watch Cameraperson what happens is we can add how we relate to these disembodied moments to what they may mean. Especially as we have more information added. We become a part of the process of discovery. We are not just bystanders as we might be if these were simply tiny moments in a larger more obvious narrative. These tiny moments become something more simply by the act of being removed from a larger picture. They aren't meaningless.

Just finished watching Cameraperson. I would have enjoyed it more if I had seen those documentaries beforehand during which these clips were made (but not shown or shown in them). That's not to say I didn't enjoy it, cause by the end I absolutely did enjoy this.


I liked the sudden change of emotions at times, the way she has glued the clips together. You go from scenes of happiness to suddenly seeing a person speaking about a crime where a man was dragged by a car up until his bones, or the mass rapes and murders.


The scenes with her mother felt personal.


My favourite were the midwives of Nigeria. But that scene, later around the end was an absolute rollercoaster.



Quite a powerful documentary. Thanks for the recommendation @SpelingError

Current candidates to host the next round...

Frightened Inmate No. 2
crumbsroom

You guys have about 24 more hours to watch the film.

This is true, probably especially so for your general audience, but it begs the question: why?


What is it that stops people from actually seeing what is on film. That is being baldly presented to them. Why are criticisms of this film so frequently falling back upon the complaint that the moments we are seeing are random and do not connect to the next series of images? Or that we need to see more before they can have meaning to us?


If Johnson were simply at a kitchen table, explaining each one of these moments from her life, one after the other (let's assume the people at the table keep asking her to continue and she hasn't simply taken dinner hostage), we would not question the value of her sharing these moments from her life. We would understand they are a story being told to us, from her perspective, from her life as a cameraperson. They would have meaning to us.


And yet, when they are laid out for us visually, in a perfect medium to show us exactly what happened to her in these incidents, what they looked like and sounded like and felt like....suddenly the average film goer asks 'huh'?



My answer, as it always is and always will be, is that the manner in which film has co-opted a very specific way of telling a story, actually stops us from seeing. It stands in the way of what is elementally obvious if we are simply willing to sit back and experience something on screen. Not have it shoe horned into an obvious arc, which is what most (and frequently the most lazy and often most cowardly) of filmmakers can't help but do. And this isn't to say some films don't sparkle when they take this route (Lord of the Rings, Sunset Boulevard, Wizard of Oz for easy examples). But in so many cases, the over reliance on these narrative mannerisms, blocks something in our way to process images on screen. It holds us hostage. It's an infection.


Every day of our lives, we walk out the door (or stay inside), do stuff (or not do stuff). Yet as the years go by, we begin to shape all of these random moments of life into narratives, that allow us to tell eachother who we are, what we've done, where we'd like to go. We all have a natural ability to find the story in the seemingly arbitrary. Ever person has this innate gift to do this on our own, without any help...and yet, so frequently, whenever we put on a film, we turn this ability off. Expect it to fill in all of the blanks. Expect it to let us know where everything is going and that it all has a purpose. And then get angry if it has the audacity to just show us something and implicitly see and understand there is a narrative already there. Just watch. And that's basically what Cameraperson does. It just wants us to watch.


So I think now I will have to elevate Cameraperson to Exhibit A of my criminal proceedings in the neverending case of crumbsroom vs the world. We will file this one under "eat shit narrative"

I kind of liked that I hadn't seen most of the films in question (I believe I watched Pray the Devil Back to Hell when it first came out, but it's been a while.)

It meant that I would encounter something and have to decide what I thought about what and who I was seeing. I didn't know how to feel about the man in the James Byrd sequence at first, because I couldn't tell what his role was in the whole thing. So there was this gap where I wasn't sure if I was going to like or dislike this person, based on what they were doing. Like Crumbsroom says, it sort of forces you to look at them in a different way because you haven't been given cues to know how to feel.

Another example is the midwife. At first she often seems curt or blunt, but as the film goes on you realize that this woman probably watches newborn babies (and their mothers!) die or suffer serious issues every day. Her mannerisms are probably a defense mechanism and maybe even some resentment of the idea that people might think she is not doing her job correctly when in fact she is under-resourced.

I won't be able to get to this one in time, getting blasted at work with the pre holiday rush.

I watched Cameraperson (2016), but unfortunately it didn't work for me. It just felt like a bunch of random video clips that were strung together with no rhyme or reason. There were even clips from the same documentaries that were separated by clips from other documentaries between them. It just made no sense to me, and seemed like a big jumble. Maybe if the clips were from documentaries that I knew about and had interest in, this might have had a chance.

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Getting to Cameraperson tonight.

The next host is...

Frightened Inmate No. 2
@crumbsroom

Wait, which?

crumbsroom, which is why I pinged his username. That's my format for this thread.

Cameraperson.

It begins with a flock of sheep. Then transitions to a storm. We watch the lightning and hear the rumble of thunder. And then we hear two sneezes as the camera shakes. It’s those little moments that will make up our journey.

Kirsten Johnson has created this cinematic journey covering 25 years of footage spanning her career. It is at times heart breaking, suspenseful, wistful, and always fascinating.

We see through the lense of her camera moments of her life. Her children. Her father. Her mother, suffering from Alzheimer’s. We see interviews with women who survived the Serbian war. We see locations of where executions were carried out.

We see a baby born, and saved as we watch it gasping for air. Guards who demand they pull over their car and stop filming. A murder trial involving a hate crime that involves grisly details. *

And Johnson is the emotional anchor to all of this. We hear moments of emotion from her. Particularly scenes involving her family, especially her mother. It is a journey, and one she shares with us. And we can’t help be swept up in its images.

Wait, what?


I actually haven't been participating in this beyond defending Cameraperson from the sidelines.

You get to make everyone watch a movie that you pick.

Embrace the power! Let it go right to your head!