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Johnson displays a willingness to interrogate her own practice—and in the process illustrates why she’s such a sterling pro. It’s the rare sort of self-awareness that radiates with humility instead of personal branding, and it’s essential in a moment when even progressive nonfiction filmmaking too often opts for emotional shorthand and cheap shots.

In one scene in Kirsten Johnson's Cameraperson, we see a USB stick being thrown into a concrete mixer. Shot while making Citizenfour with director Laura Poitras, we watch as it is laid into the concrete floor and buried. We don't know if the contents of at least part of the drive were released by Edward Snowden. We can only imagine that some of those images, data, and reports have disappeared. This shot and the worries it evokes echo throughout Johnson's remarkable film.

The grounding presence is Johnson, whose status as a cameraperson becomes the film's thematic core, adopting the perspective the professional observer instead of the person in charge. Johnson's footage is especially compelling because of the nature of her work, which has taken her to war zones and other global hotspots. Though the film lacks actual instances of battle, it's infused with the tension of buildup and aftermath.

Shots that feature fumbling and reframing are integrated the way a confident painter builds a picture around bare canvas, loose brushwork, spattered drips. And there's... a nagging question implicit in the most searching documentaries as well as the most trivial: At what point does the camera's scrutiny become exploitative, invasive, damaging? The question hovers throughout the film, despite Johnson's evident gift for putting people at ease, respecting the pressure and pain of true confession.

Some sequences do seem to unfold with spontaneous force and symmetry. You'd struggle to find any piece of scripted drama more heated, unpredictable and finally touching than that in which a beaten Brooklyn boxer bursts from the ring, furious and heartbroken, charges back in the direction of his opponent, pursued by Johnson's camera, and ends up in the arms of his mother. Elsewhere, however, stories tell themselves scrappily, untidily, and with uncertain meaning.

Kirsten Johnson (in close collaboration with editor Nels Bangerter) made the best movie of the year from fragments of other movies, finding the essence of documentary cinema in scraps and diaries. No film has more eloquently revealed the provisional, flawed, hopeful, expansive, manipulative, righteous human endeavour called documentary filmmaking.

Johnson's powerful documentary is a fragmented story about the moral, professional and creative responsibilities one is instantly bestowed while working behind the camera. Her years of experience as a documentary cinematographer have gifted her with an array of astonishing material.

As a collection of memories, Cameraperson resonates with a unique kind of melancholy. For Johnson, the act of filming becomes a search for external meaning, and one that always leads her back home to the personal. This kind of life cycle—which fluctuates between emotions and experiences, highs and lows—never trivializes the intimacy of human interaction.

Johnson's shots are all tightly linked by a structural device—white titles noting the location of events on black—that at first seems like no structure at all. Yet over the course of the film, Johnson constructs her collected odds and ends into an intense, incantatory experience that leaves her bare, even though she only appears once briefly onscreen. The net effect of Cameraperson leaves one realizing that to be a great cameraperson one must be a certain kind of _person_ first. Probably a great one.

The _meaning_ of these collected images, when taken together, is much more subtle and philosophical, ultimately less a resume than an interrogation of the power and responsibility of the camera.

It's not merely a grab bag of images. It pulls double duty as a theoretical essay on the cinematic apparatus itself. Johnson breaks down the ludicrous cinéma vérité ideal of documentaries as ambivalent and purely observational. ("The documentarian should be as a cat on a windowsill," acclaimed documentarian D.A. Pennebaker once said.)

Veteran cinematographer Kirsten Johnson's memoir of her working life is a vital antidote to the artless exposition that constitutes so much documentary filmmaking. In a mode that's contemplative rather than programmatic, Johnson takes a tour through her c.v., a highlight reel that becomes a kind of retroactive diary.