We’re living in boom times for non-fiction cinema, what may be one of the most creatively fertile periods in the history of the American documentary. Aside from the more obvious breakout hits, there’s a small but exciting movement of boundary-pushing films that endeavor to deconstruct and expand our understanding of the form, a set of innovative screen experiments that find elusive truths through contrived circumstances.
At the forefront of this miniature revolution is the great Kirsten Johnson and her latest film Dick Johnson Is Dead, streaming this weekend on Netflix. She won a special award for innovation in non-fiction storytelling at Sundance this past January for her unique approach to the premise of a premature commemoration of her father’s memory before he succumbs to Alzheimer’s. In an effort to get a leg up on her inevitable grief, she staged a series of scenarios simulating her kindly father’s death, from a sudden demise by falling air conditioner to a transcendent, confetti-strewn vision of heaven complete with chocolate fondue fountain. No less importantly, she turned the camera on herself and her authorship as she carried out this odd, inspired mission. Like her colleagues, she believes a viewer can learn as much from the mechanism itself as the results it generates.
“I want to break cinema,” she tells the Guardian at the top of a discursive, illuminating phone call. “I want to push it until it gives me back something that’s impossible.”
That was her goal with her debut feature, 2016’s Cameraperson, a freeform collage of autobiography pieced together from repurposed footage shot in her career as a cinematographer. She eschewed the usual talking head interviews and the pretension of a bogus objectivity on her way to a more genuine style, in which the finished product accounts for and integrates her perspective as a constructor of images. It would be disingenuous to suggest that work over which a creator exerts a personal influence could come from an impartial nowhere, she reasoned, so best to get out in front of yourself. Such an assured, complete statement of artistic intent would leave a lesser film-maker wondering what’s left to cover, but Johnson only felt liberated.
“I made [Cameraperson] out of this desperate need to ask these questions to myself, and the whole thing was very unfamiliar to me as it emerged,” she says. “I made that out of need, didn’t know what it was going to be, and so I was afraid of failure. Now, I can take a bigger risk. I can go deeper. It can be more disastrous, and more unfamiliar. This entire project emerged with a sense of trust that, first off, I will fail. I tried to make this film in order to keep my father alive forever. Failure was inevitable. Maybe.”
Johnson’s spirit of curious, uncertain questioning – after five minutes of conversation, her wise and inquisitive tone gives her away as a college professor – guides Dick Johnson Is Dead through a fantastical afterlife. She built an investigative quality right into the fabric of her technique, which presents a multitude of situations informed by multiple schools of thought. Her father’s background in Christianity shapes the spectacular soundstage paradise reuniting him with his dearly departed wife, while a banality bordering on the nihilistic lingers as Dick’s unmoving body lies crumpled at the foot of a staircase. “When documentary film-makers experiment with fiction elements, we forget what we know,” she says. “We try to mimic the control we imagine fiction film-makers to have. But in fact, if we turn ourselves over to what we do and just search, not knowing, you enter a territory in which the unexpected and delightful can present themselves.”
She wanted to put her father out to sea on an iceberg, and for the first time in her career, she had the budget for it. But safety was the most vital yet restrictive parameter she had to consider, working with a subject of declining mental facility. Her ethic of total transparency meant weaving the careful considerations she had to take for her father’s wellbeing into the film itself, as if embedding a particularly revealing making-of featurette in the proper run time. “You question yourself at every moment,” she says. “Real questioning. It’s not an abstract ethical dilemma, if my father’s about to step into oncoming traffic because he can’t remember that I told him to stand on the corner. It is that literal – am I putting my father’s life at risk, moment to moment?”
Every time she called action, there was a non-zero chance something could happen to endanger the agreeable, up-for-anything Dick. She recalls one day’s shoot that placed her father behind the wheel of a car; she left the keys in the ignition for one take in order to operate the windshield wipers, and an unwitting Dick lurched the vehicle forward into the crew’s gear. She realized that constant, vigilant mindfulness would be the only acceptable option on set. “This is the question whenever you’re filming someone with less power than you,” she says. “It’s always the case that you have power over them, however, it’s also the case that they have more agency than you realize. Opening up the space in which my dad’s agency could exhibit itself, asking him questions in the middle of things, letting him call the shots, letting him say no, letting him decide which take would be the last.”
The film seriously engages with the unsavory question of exploitation, a third rail in the non-fiction world. In one haunting passage, she stages an ambulance ride and places herself in the back with her expiring dad. Even in this uncomfortably intimate space, she continues her chronicling, setting the camera down but letting it roll. For a viewer outside the family fold, it almost feels like we’re seeing something we shouldn’t. “There were so many times when I thought, ‘What will I do?’” she says. “I don’t know what I’d do if he tripped and fell, in the moment. Will I put the camera down? Will I keep filming? The ambulance scene is an interrogation of that, looking at what I’d do if placed in a scenario of real emergency like that. Would I shoot it? Of course I would.
“By owning that humanity, by not trying to hide where you might be impotent or wrong or profane, then you’re allowed much closer to reality,” she adds. With her total self-effacing candor on the topic, what would be a weakness if hidden becomes another facet of authentic imperfection through its exposure.
By the film’s end, however, the sterling-silver love between the two Johnsons assuages much of the moral concern this arrangement may raise. That’s the precious gem mined from the ore of cinema, an affection and care all the more affecting for its basis in a hard verisimilitude. “I work on this theory,” Johnson explains, “that even when a film is incredibly powerful emotionally, like Anthony Hopkins in The Father, we know that he doesn’t really have dementia. That’s a relief to us. We don’t have to face the same thing that we face when we watch Dick Johnson Is Dead. The audience walks out of the theater knowing that this dementia is eating my father alive. We value the thing that protects us from our own fear, and we wish to turn away from the thing that encourages us to face our fears.”
Johnson still has no choice but to face hers, having recently moved her indestructible father into a care facility. The film’s reflexive concept meant confronting herself at every turn, tackling anxiety and self-consciousness head-on. In the sort of shot many documentarians try to obscure, she shows herself recording three different takes of a single voiceover line, measuring the emotion in her voice and tacitly taking stock of how much of it might be performative. The fullness of this disclosure makes the film stronger, and Johnson along with it. “I feel braver, since Cameraperson, and more brave still with this film,” she declares. “I want to make a mess with the next thing I make, pushing everyone and pulling them back.”
It is perhaps in this spirit that she concludes the interview by saying she looks forward to reading the eventual article. When I tell her I find it unsettling to write something in the knowledge that it will get back to the talent, she scuttles any worry by doing what she does, and shatters the illusion of the process. She says that the article will be something we’ve forged together, a revealing impression halfway between her self-perception and how she appears to everyone else. She says that no matter the take, an analysis from outside of her own brain will enrich her view of her own work. She says that what may challenge or even hurt her will be the most valuable part. “You cannot fail me,” she says. “You can’t.”
Dick Johnson Is Dead is available on Netflix on 2 October
