‘Cameraperson’ is an autobiography through images
Directed by Kirsten Johnson, the cameraman — or cameraperson — on a number of distinguished documentaries, the movie assembles footage shot for those films into a kind of autobiography.
What results isn’t a straight autobiography, obviously, but rather the autobiography of a career and, most importantly, the autobiography of a spirit.
[...] we have a sense of Johnson’s presence, of her very engaged, open and appealing personality.
The “sense of being there” in this film is different from the usual sense of location that we get in other movies.
Often it’s only later, looking at the videos or the photos, that you fully feel the strangeness and wonder of having been so far from home.
[...] the images from a camera give us permission to get free of our bodies and engage on a more spiritual level.
At one point, she gives us shots of various places where mass murders or tortures were committed.
[...] that by the time we actually see her, late in the film, in a two-shot talking to her mother, we feel that we’ve already met.
Mick LaSalle is The San Francisco Chronicle’s movie critic.