Kirsten Johnson’s unique project intercuts 20 years of personal and professional footage to form a bizarre, absorbing creation that often feels like a lucid dream
Cinematographer Kirsten Johnson has shot movies including Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), Kirby Dick’s The Invisible War (2012) and Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour (2014); now she has created an audacious, bracingly experimental collage-film of her own, putting together a mosaic of film-fragments from the 20 years that she has shot for other people, and also personal material about her own family. The resulting film is a fascinating and unique meta-documentary or quasi-professional memoir; it challenges the question of personality and authorship in the act of seeing, filming and editing (and Johnson was not responsible for the editing here). The images we see may have been created by her – or they may have, in a sense, created her. And the title contains an implied question about gender to go with the implied or submerged issue of autobiography.
It is an arresting experience, though it occasionally edges towards narcissism in ways Johnson might not have entirely realised. It can be disconcerting to see passages about Bosnia or Yemen or Guantánamo Bay, juxtaposed so they appear to lead hintingly back to the person behind the camera. But this is only to restate what should be obvious but often isn’t: the camera is being directed by a flesh-and-blood human being with conscious and unconscious biases.
Continue reading...