[149 points / 16 votes]
“If there was one recurrent trend among the great films released in 2016, it was the dominance of documentary filmmaking. From the highly touted one-two punch of the monumental, mammoth O.J.: Made in America and striking I Am Not Your Negro, to the less known but equally ground-breaking works like Kate Plays Christine, No Home Movie, and The Other Side, and everything in between, there was at least one documentary that any sensible movie viewer loved this year. But no other non-fiction film was as groundbreaking, profoundly revelatory, or intensely personal as Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson.
“Formed from fragments and outtakes shot for myriad documentaries over the documentary camera operator’s twenty-five year career, Cameraperson begins with a brief statement of intent that says, ‘These are the images that have marked me.’ Indeed, many of these images are astonishingly indelible, though some are more immediately arresting than others. They span the gamut of human existence literally from the cradle to the grave, jumping around through space and time in the span of a single cut to an intertitle. And these intertitles (containing the simple location of the following clip) are key, placing these contextless clips in just enough of a framework to link the otherwise disparate locations.
“Of course, these clips are fundamentally associated through their ‘creator’ and documentarian. There are undoubtedly strong similarities between Cameraperson and Chris Marker’s masterpiece Sans soleil, in the way they both use a vast assortment of sharply edited footage from around the world to provide a revolutionary vision of the human experience, but the former is the more personal work. This manifests itself clearly in Johnson’s heartbreaking footage of her mother, but it is just as key in the small interjections she makes from behind the camera, in the empathy that manifests itself in nearly every clip even and especially in the harshest, most desolate of locations.
“It is a film that exists irrevocably in the moment, but it also belongs to all times. Cameraperson’s most haunting and impactful scene is one of its few montages, a compilation of a shocking amount of places around the world where unimaginable atrocities and violence have taken place, but there is equal importance in the individual stories, in the struggle of a newborn to stay alive and in a family living in postwar Bosnia simply living. Behind it all, there is the watchful, intensely emotional eye of Kirsten Johnson, who provides perhaps the most noble of all cinematic intentions: the act of witnessing.” ~ Ryan Swen
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