On May 23, the Plage du CNC hosted a Cannes Docs talk titled ‘Cinema and the Pleasures of the Impossible.’ The event, moderated by writer-director and producer Guetty Felin, saw the participation of director and DOP Kirsten Johnson, President of the 2023 OEil d’or Jury.
The talk focused in particular on Johnson’s work on filming and telling stories both on the “impossible” but also on the “forbidden,” a word very familiar to both speakers as they grew up in strict, conservative environments.
Felin asked how Johnson became interested in exploring the spheres of the ‘impossible’ and of the ‘forbidden.’ “Dictators and fascists want to tell us only a few stories. […] I was raised a Seventh-day Adventist, and there was only one storyline, a set of beliefs. The thing I’m still unpacking over the decades is [the idea] that God knew my thoughts before I thought [them]. God is a ‘dictator’ that could things to your family if you step outside of the narrative,” said Johnson.
She disclosed that she began fantasising about preaching in front of her church’s audience, highlighting how part of the joy of camera work is the possibility to “go on a stage” and access forbidden places. “I’ve brought cinema to that stage of the church I’ve fantasised about, but it took time.”
Fascinated by Johnson’s anecdote, Felin underscored how Jean-Luc Godard used to say that cinema is indeed not just happening on a flat screen, but it’s also living in the space between the screen and the audience.
Next, Felin asked Johnson when she had realised she could devote her life to cinema. The first moment of realisation came very soon. “When I was two, I was brought back [home] from day care and I said: ‘no go back!’ [meaning that she did not wish to return to the nursery]. My parents were slightly alarmed and I wouldn’t answer. ‘It’s very important, you must answer!’ they told me.”
The reason for her being upset was the lack of pictures on the wall of the centre. “My mother had created an audiovisually stimulating world and once I stepped out of that I was wondering what was going on.”
Later on, at the age of 15, she was engaged in some school activities and found out that washing machines were washing whites and coloured clothes separately. A girl said that such separation reminded her of Apartheid, but Johnson didn’t know what Apartheid was. Her teacher told her what her parents had never told her. “The world outside of my family suddenly existed. I felt betrayed.”
Speaking about the topic of access, Johnson revealed her experience of filming a 16-year-old girl in Afghanistan in 2009. The girl wanted to be filmed, and at that time there was little Internet access throughout the country. “By the time I showed her the rough cut of the film, she was terrified the film could be seen by her neighbours, who were Taliban sympathisers. I was shocked: How did not I see this coming? It shook me to the core.”
The conversation then shifted to the making of Cameraperson (2016), and in particular the editing process and the relationship between body and image. “I worked with one editor for many years and I was talking and talking over the footage. Then this idea bubbled up: maybe I don’t speak, and the images speak for themselves.” As soon as Johnson left her editor alone with the footage, she could finally “see herself.” “I didn’t understand to what extent I was in the footage, and this shifted my idea of what a film is. […] Part of the beauty of it is forgetting about the presence.”
“We have all of these pressures of capitalism, politics that are set up to eliminate our ‘peopleness,’ our point of view on the product that goes out in the world. We have AI, machine-operated cameras, so there’s pressure on the future of cinema to remove the bodies…[For example,] if you’re a woman in Afghanistan the pressure is very high when you take your cell phone. And this pressures comes from the disconnect between images and bodies.”
Later, the talk focused on Johnson’s second feature as a director, Dick Johnson is Dead (2020), In it, her father, who suffers from mild dementia, plays along with Johnson’s black humour and imaginative fantasies.
Her first early shock was finding out that her mother was going to die, but she would have never imagined her father was going to encounter the same destiny soon. “My father was a psychiatrist. He was very loving and interested in his patients. That pain was real, and yet he closed that door and he would come out laughing on the other side. [I thought] there’s got to be a way that cinema can help us laugh about this. I need cinema to help me.”
“People were concerned and afraid that it would be exploitative, that I’d be endangering my father. My brother was concerned about my father’s reputation and his own.”
Moreover, she noted how “dementia changes the relationship with time, and that’s what cinema does.”
Talking about some of the lessons learnt throughout her career, Johnson zoomed in on the topics of complexity and trauma.
“I’m interested how people have the freedom to grapple with the complexity and not to be told how to understand it. […] It’s also very powerful what happened over the last 20 years. Because of the Internet, people who have been isolated have learnt that they’re not alone. […] Digital communities have given us an awareness of the scale of trauma and ongoing violence that exists in the world, [and] we start learning more about how humans disassociate.”
“We saw that after WW2. One of my powerful introductions to cinema was doing camera work with people who survived the Holocaust,” Johnson said, adding that over half of her 270 interviewees “had never spoken about what happened to them before.”
“For me it was this incredible window to see people who have experienced something terrible, and what they’ve [had to] to do live. We start realising orders of magnitude beyond we’ve ever imagined.”
Finally, Johnson explained how a single image can be traumatising and shocking enough. “I learnt [that] by filming in Jasper, Texas when I saw the image of James Byrd’s body [James Byrd was Black American man who was murdered in 1998 by three white men, two of whom were avowed white supremacists]. I learnt that over and over again as a camera person. One image can stay with you for life and change how you see the world.”
