Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 9 July

Cameraperson (Johnson, 2016)

Looking for an ‘on this day’ post, I realise that most of my early July work over the last 18 years or so have been film festival previews.

Here’s a great one from 2016:

Documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson has been witness to some of the most extraordinary people and events of the last 20 years and in her first film as director she’s produced a remarkable and unique memoir proving that she’s as sensitive and sure-footed a director as any of the collaborators she’s worked alongside. All of the footage in Cameraperson was shot for other reasons, other projects, but by reassembling them (and often extending shots beyond the versions that were used for other films) she has created an immensely powerful personal narrative. It’s a portrait of the life of an artist but it’s also an involving meditation on many different iterations of motherhood.

Johnson’s brilliant follow-up film, Dick Johnson Is Dead, about her relationship with her father and his slow deterioration due to dementia, is still streaming on Netflix if you want something from her but don’t have a Mubi subscription.

Also featured in that year’s festival preview were: “combustibly dry black comedy” The First, The Last, Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! (featuring Glen Powell hiding under a seventies moustache), disturbing Free In Deed by Jake Mahaffy, Canada’s Les Démons, Wild about a woman and her wolf, and a documentary about an Israeli choreographer called Gaga. I got around a bit in those days.