The remarkable thing about Cameraperson, which I admired and felt connected to more and more as it went along, is that it is deceptive in a good way; at first things seem to not have much structure (except that, at least for the first half hour, Johnson is cutting generally from scenes she's shot in the United States to scenes that she captured in places like the Middle East or in Africa). But then in the second half of the film, things pay off that one didn't really expect to. Take the story of the nurse (or is she a doctor, she doesn't have a title exactly, perhaps simply midwife) in the hospital in Nigeria who helps deliver a beautiful baby (the beauty part isn't necessarily emphasized, it's simply there in Johnson's purely humanistic lens), and mentions that she's going to help deliver the twin that is still inside the mother.
Then Johnson cuts away and I thought that would be it, but instead she comes back to it about an hour into the documentary, where now the baby has been born but it's in danger of possibly dying - the nurse/midwife is able to keep the child at least breathing and awake, but they don't have oxygen at the hospital. Another case in point is a boxing match, where it seems early on to be footage of a middle-weight getting ready for a fight, and it cuts away and that's that. Again, an hour later, this pays off and we see that this fighter lost and leaves in a major huff (Johnson, breathlessly, moves so that she can get the shot in the hallway of him coming down), and he has a meltdown in the locker room, though a believable one, and in its approach its much rawer than anything that could be seen in a boxing movie in a thousand years.
What makes this special is that Johnson gets to fully embrace this unique "memoir" approach and is able to give us little moments that are little snapshots - think if it's like going through a scrapbook where you may only have one or two shots of Derrida or some sheep being flocked to and fro, but then a whole lot of pages of photos to the Bosnians, who make up probably the most of the run-time if I had to gauge a percentage - but there's storytelling woven in in that plant-pay-off sense. And the one constant that connects everything together is simple but a wonder to behold: Johnson is curious about people (or at least she is always there for her directors if she's not directly involved, which she usually is in some collaborative form), and we see their joys and pains and how much so many of these people have LIVED in these lifetimes where we take for granted what goes on.
Sure, one might want to criticize there are perhaps too many scenes of women crying or becoming upset - that is another constant, even including an outtake from a scene in Fahrenheit 9/11 with the soldier who feels not fully one way about not going back to war - yet that's what I liked about it, since it's not simply that. She doesn't suddenly cut in to someone crying or having a fit, there is build up and pay-off to these moments that she's captured so that, and I'm not the only one to point this out, it's also like each scrapbook page has a short story that tells gives us enough of a window so that we can feel more curious about their lives, which sometimes a documentary that's consumed in a narrative can't always do. And the juxtapositions are absorbing as well; she'll go from, say, showing a woman who has seen some horrors of rape and murder in a third world setting, to a... woman who has had it with her memories and throws all of her possessions across a room (this is one of the more memorable bits to me, especially at the end when they all break into laughter at the insanity they've just been a part of).
It goes without saying that this is all personal for her, and it can't not be that. Why, one might ask, does she include footage of her children and her father, for example, though with all the rest of this footage from these numerous documentaries she's photographed? Well, for starters, because she *can*, it's her movie, it's her memoir, but I think it also ties in with the rest of the film because she's lived as much genuinely and passionately with her kids going to pick up a dead bird in the backyard as she's had in that African hospital or in Darfur or anywhere else. And the title carries emphasis as well; we never really say 'Camera-Woman', and yet 'Camera Person' sounds like something we usually wouldn't say or categorize. But maybe it's two different words, not necessarily about herself: she is the camera, and everyone else is the person, vulnerable and alive and in the moment, whether it's the kid with the bad eye who witnessed his brother being tortured/abused, or Jacques Derrida crossing a Manhattan street.
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