‘Dick Johnson Is Dead’ Filmmaker Kirsten Johnson Wants to Be in the World, She Tells Ji.hlava Doc Fest
Veteran cinematographer and director Kirsten Johnson has some thoughts on the power of image.
“There’s never one meaning,” she told filmmakers gathered to meet with her at the Ji.hlava Documentary Film Festival.
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Having lensed more that 50 films from the early 1990s on, including “Derrida,” “Fahrenheit 911” “Pray the Devil Back to Hell” and “Citizenfour,” the ebullient and down-to-earth Johnson stepped into directing in 2016 with “Cameraperson.”
That film, a remarkable look back over her career, which spanned current affairs and doc shoots in war zones worldwide – and covered five genocides – helped Johnson deal with much of the trauma she’s covered in her career. “I needed to make that film to help me process,” she says.
It also led to insights in taking agency over what fills the screen, most recently 2020’s “Dick Johnson Is Dead,” which screened before deeply engaged Ji.hlava audiences.
The Netflix-produced project follows Johnson’s father, who with her help, copes with dementia by imaging and acting out all the ways he might meet his demise. His unique experience spying on his own funeral to hilarious effect was the sequence that got Netflix onboard, Johnson says.
But, as is her wont, Johnson has bigger things on her mind these days. Humans since the advent of the iPhone, she says, have been swimming in an “incredible proliferation of images.” And it’s about time we think about what that means.
In the days when being a filmmaker was a unique calling, before everyone called themselves that, she says, it was a little different. “In the middle of the 90s I realized I was part machine, part person.”
Her physical relationship with a camera is central to what makes “Cameraperson” such a powerful testament. Constructed from footage shot for other films but not used in them – or used for a strikingly different purpose, Johnson’s shots reveal her presence and vision in ways that are normally hidden.
A sneeze jitters the frame of a landscape shot, while her shadow crosses sunny ground in another, before her hand reaches in front of the lens to pull a weed in a third, creating the perfect conflict zone master shot.
These days she’s less concerned with the perfect shot, she says, and allows the camera to run while she’s still finding her composition. She also thinks about the power the camera has over subjects in front of it – and the power it may lend them. “These are all of our questions,” she says.
Another central one is the role people need to play – which is often in contrast to the one a documentarian wants to film, says Johnson. Her father, she recalls, had decided to wear a pillowcase over his head one day when she arrived for a visit to his hospital room.
Her dad, like so many in awful circumstances she has filmed, was not going to be the helpless victim that day. Instead, he showed “the need to feel something besides impotent and scared.” As Johnson recalls, “This made me laugh and gave me solace.”
She recalls filming another equally strong-willed woman who had survived Balkan War rape squads years ago. The director had come there “to talk about rape.” But the woman wouldn’t discuss anything that had happened to her. Finally, Johnson asked her if she’d always been such a stylish dresser.
“Always,” she said, finally opening up. “She needed to speak about pleasure. She could not speak about the past.”
What matters most to many who’ve been through unimaginable trauma, says Johnson, is not being defeated. Their mission statement? “I lived. I’m myself. I’m not letting you take me down.”
The camera is not always the enemy, of course, as Johnson’s learned. “Images can sometimes save people,” she says, recalling a soldier who appeared in “Fahrenheit 911” and spontaneously announced on camera that he would not be deploying to Iraq “to kill brown people.”
The decision could easily have led to his court martial and imprisonment. But when his words came out onscreen, the army notified his unit that they had the option of whether to serve in Iraq or somewhere else.
At other times, images can “make people into targets,” Johnson says. Or they can be “weapons of self-defense.”
And in a world where they’re shared globally in nanoseconds, she adds, “We’re talking to each other across time and space.” And, she says, “inviting each other to play.”
On the subject of AI, another subject Johnson has thought about a lot, she notes that algorithms are making more images than those recorded in all of human history every moment, just from user prompts.
But, she notes, “AI doesn’t have a body – but we do.” And the decision of how a body is recorded and presented is something humans alone have an instinctive understanding of. When filming war devastation, Johnson learned, it’s immediately clear when something is very wrong is you encounter “bodies in positions they’re not supposed to be in.”
And bodies – real human ones – demand respect, Johson says. “Capitalism doesn’t have a body. Tech doesn’t have a body.”
Having grown up in a Seventh Day Adventist religious community, says Johnson, she had a unique view of the world and the afterlife. In that culture, she says, “We are not of the world.” But the day came as she grew when she became obsessed with capturing lives on camera. And on that day, she understood something core to her being: “I want to be in the world. In history.”
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