一堂攝影哲學課：30餘年拍攝經驗、屢獲大獎的攝影師在鏡頭之外的思考 Dialogue with Kirsten Johnson

That's pretty. Look at that yellow flower. There's some easy wildflowers here. Is the haze working for you? Not loving it, but we're getting pieces of stuff that don't have haze. Was it an easy delivery, that one? Yes, it was very easy. They caught me. Is it okay if I film you? Mom? I want to change the subject and ask if she was always such a great dresser. Is she always such a great dresser? Does she have style? Always. It's interesting because this is actually the first time I made a film really out of a need. It wasn't so much a want. I didn't literally go through thousands and thousands of hours. I started trying to make a film in Afghanistan. I worked on it for three years. I finished a rough cut of it. I showed it to one of the young women in the film. She said, I'm sorry. I'm now too afraid to be in this movie. I felt bad for me because I had been trying to make a movie. It was really clear her fears were real. I couldn't make that movie. Almost everybody in this room, you are born after the internet exists. But I'm not. When I started filming, we would promise people, I promise you we will control where your image goes. Don't worry if you're speaking out against the government. If you are speaking out against your father in a domestic abuse situation. Don't worry. They'll never see it. But what we didn't know is that we didn't understand the future. And that we were lying to people without knowing it. Because we couldn't know the future. When that happened with her, it suddenly made me think about the past. And think about situations I had been in that were ethically complicated. It made me want to revisit that. Your film, of all the materials that you have selected, the way you put it together is in a non-linear form. So while you were editing, it must be difficult. And was this some themes that stands out and then become something that unite or become a theme that glue the film together? As I said, initially I didn't even know if it could be a film. I had one destroyed film and I had a lot of questions. So I became really determined just to ask the questions. Because I've worked on a lot of films for a lot of people. I've directed other films. And it was like, I don't want to make a film that gives false answers. I want to make a film that embodies the questions that I have. And so I really worked with this incredible editor, Nels Bengerter. But the thing that we sort of said from the beginning is, one, we know the audience is smart. And we know they are dealing with the same complex world that I am dealing with. And if we can, in some ways, give the audience the tools to understand what it is to be me, then you can be in the questions with me. And if we can do that in the right order, then maybe it's possible to communicate what is this experience. So that was always the goal. It was like, really believe in the audience, but give the tools for the audience to engage the way I have to engage. One last question, then I'll ask. It will be your turn to ask questions. I asked you earlier, was it difficult to put yourself and your family and your parents in the film? Well, I think the thing that's interesting that happens with many films that all of us try to make is that you become really, you often become very intimate and close to the people that you are filming. And yet, it is their lives, right? And sometimes you're going into a situation where people have survived a genocide and you're asking them to tell you these incredible things about their lives. And then you take that material and their most vulnerable selves you put on screen in the service of a movie that you are making. And it felt to me at a certain point that to show the level of implication that I have, that I had to, in some ways, sacrifice my own mother and my own children in the way that we sacrifice other people. And, you know, I believe the work of filming people is so multifaceted that it is doing beautiful things and harmful things simultaneously. And so for me, it was terribly difficult because I know my mother would feel very betrayed by being in the film this way. She would have hated to see herself in the film this way. And I know that as her daughter. Whether you know that as the audience or not, it is a deep betrayal. And so owning that betrayal and owning the way we betray people when we make films felt essential to me in this to sort of own all pieces of it that I could. It's kind of like an equalizer in a way. Yeah, and it also really raises this question of permission. You know, my mother is far gone in Alzheimer's. My children are babies. They have not given their permission to be in this film. And it was funny. We showed the film for the parents at my children's school and there was the poster of the movie and apparently one of the other parents had shown the trailer of the movie to a child in my kid's class. They're six now. And my feelings came home and he said, am I naked in the movie? And it was like, this is the perfect question. Yes, he is revealed and he is naked. He's in his diapers in the movie. And I think this is it. We are all naked in this movie, right? Okay, so I'm sure all of you have many questions. Yeah, there's one right there. Yeah, so I just wanted to follow on from, I guess, the point you were making around the use of images. Maybe it was more, what are the moral and ethical questions that you ask yourself when filming somebody else? But also, I guess, what are the moral and ethical questions you ask around your own, including yourself in the film? So I'm thinking in particular about the scene in front of the Amini prison where you're sort of debating about how much danger. It seemed like there was sort of an open dialogue about how much danger you want to put yourself and your fixer into. And where, I guess, what are the differences between those questions? Are you prepared to maybe put yourself in situations or use your own image differently? Yeah, I mean, well, that was this really incredible moment because we were working with this Yemeni journalist and we were hoping to film this prison. But he basically said to us, you know, you and Laura, if we get stopped and we get arrested for doing this, which, you know, if they understand what we're doing, they will do that. You two will probably have to spend a couple of days in prison. But I don't know when I will get out, right? And this is often the case, right, Nancy? That, you know, you go to a place that is someone else's world and they have to deal with much higher stakes than you do. You are often the ones who can leave or often the ones who can appeal to your embassy and get out, especially if you're an American. So, you know, we were going into that with that sort of incredible burden of knowing that he was the one. And it's actually... I wish we had the footage of what happened. It was kind of incredible what happened was, you know, we were being stopped by the prison official and I reached back to have Laura give me... It was a tape at the time, to give me another tape and put it in. I was like, it's fine, it's Laura Poitras, she understands. Like, she'll give me a tape. She gave me a tape and I got it in the camera and, you know, the official said, you know, show me, show me. And I pushed play and she had handed me a tape from the night before, so it was night-time shooting. And he looks at me and I look at him and he had just, like, the littlest twinkle in his eye and I said, this is a very special camera. And he said, it is a very special camera. And I said, yes, it turns day into night. And he was just like, get out of here. And, you know, we were gone. But, I mean, to go back to your question, I mean, I hope you understand that the way I experience filming is just endless ethical questioning and it's literally in a moment-to-moment basis. So the kids with the axe is like the metaphor for the ethics. Like, it's OK to film, no, it's not OK. Someone's going to get hurt, no, they're not going to get hurt. In the beginning, I used to think you could decide, I'm a decent person, I'm going to be a decent person. But the world is much too complex for that. And so that you are, you know, almost every moment saying, do I stop filming, do I keep filming, why am I filming? And then sometimes, like with the baby, you know, you really question, like, why did I film that? And, you know, I can tell you more about that, but, you know, you really, it's a scale balance that never settles. But my question would be, did you feel therapeutic after making this film? Or maybe you can add a few more about your creative process. How did you, somehow we see these footages, I was wondering as I was watching it, but somehow you managed to pierce them together in such a way that there's actually a few themes. There are the whistleblowers, the boxing champion, you know, you really showed before the match and after the losses. How did you figure out that threat that somehow bring these footages together? Somehow in the end, I could see that everything just totally came together towards the end. How did you manage to do that? I think that was really incredible. I mean, I'm not going to lie, it was a really deep, crazy process. And, you know, I mean, I think my, what I was challenged by and troubled by is the connective tissue of the movie, right? And I don't think, we did not know that it would work in any kind of way. But, you know, one of the things that happened to me in the making of it was that, you know, I worked and worked for months and I had a voiceover and we watched a cut of it and it was like, literally everyone watched it with their hands, like it was horrific, literally horrific. There was like an hour of the scene in the hospital in Nigeria. And like, you know, dial it up more, more, more, more in terms of the awfulness of what people were suffering. And the producer I was working with looked at me and she was like, are you okay? Because I had been working on it, I did not realize how impossible to watch it was. And this was like a big revelation for me that I was more traumatized than I knew I was because, you know, I think this is true for a lot of people who work at scale. So nurses, social workers, translators, police officers, many people who encounter violence and difficulty of other people over and over and over again. You cannot say it's hard on me because it's the other people who are living through the war. You have some kind of detachment. I don't think you have a detachment. For me, it's like respect. Like, they live in war. I go home, like that was scary and I freaked out and I saw a dead body, but like, they live there. That's their home being destroyed. So for me, it was always a matter of principle, ethics, like humility. I can't, this is not my pain. This is their pain. But then you accumulate that over 25 years. It's a fair amount of pain that you've been letting like flow through your body and it was definitely stuck in my body. I was at a place where I could not, I didn't even understand how much it was. So I'd put it all in the movie and then the producer's like, why don't we take a little time off, get a little distance, right? And what was really beautiful was that I did take that time off and the editor started finding the me that loves life, like finding the moments of laughter and generosity and food. And I think we all know that when we see movies in which people are only miserable and only suffering and only sad, we don't trust them, right? Because people find a way, I mean, really, truly, the people who are in the worst situation in the world are the most hilarious because they're just like, this is insane and I'm going to survive mentally. So that was this great thing to realize, like to go through like, oh, everything is ugly and then remember like, oh, actually, we as humans keep finding reasons to love each other and to live and to struggle against oppression. I'm wondering about how your role as a mother has impacted and influenced the way you film, especially in the hospital scene because obviously you've been filming for a really long time and your kids are six years old. I'm curious why you care about that. I just became a mother about 18 months ago and I also produce film and videos. So it's impacted the way I work too. So I'm just wondering about how you work. Yeah, it's really, I mean, the thing that I didn't know would be in the footage was all of this sort of evidence of me at various stages of my life. Like here, I'm a young person. I'm just like, oh, who's hot? And here, my mother is ill and I'm like, oh, look at that nice old lady. And when I was filming in the maternity ward, I really wanted to get pregnant and I was not able to get pregnant. So I see these things in the footage about how I shift as a person in time, at different stages in my life as a person. And I think that there is, I'm really interested in how do we parent in a way that stays connected to the complexities and injustices of the world, right? Like there's this really strong tension between once we bring children into the world, we have an obligation to them. They are utterly dependent on us. We are nurturing to them. We need to be loving to them. We need to be consistent for them. But do you abandon your creative self? Do you abandon the self that struggles with what a mess the world is, right? And I feel really committed to trying to be all of those things simultaneously and sort of reveal that struggle to my children. And so that's been like a, I feel like I understand different things about the world now, but that I want to be in this same level of engagement with the world. So that's the struggle, right? That we feel, but I think it's a really kind of thrilling one. And when the Bosnian woman said, your children will see who you were, it was the first time it occurred to me I was making this film for the future. I always thought I was making it for the past. And that was just like this big reveal for me. I also, young women who ask me if they can be camera people and be mothers, I'm always like, I need the young men to ask me, can I be a camera person and be a father, right? I need all of us to be engaged in this question of how do we be working artists, working people, working parents, loving parents, and find a way all of us to do that together, right? Hi. I wanted to know when you put the name of the cities, why you decide not to put the year? Yeah. Well, we went through every iteration. We're going to put the name of the movie, we're going to put the year, but we found that what we were trying to do was give as little context as possible. And we found that once you put in the year, then the brain was too busy trying to understand are we going chronologically? It was distracting. And the movie is about the way in which cinema is time travel, and there are clues to where you are in time, but time is very elusive. So we wanted that to be a part of it. Thanks. You must have done a lot of preparation work, like do a lot of research sort of things. And during your shooting procedure, there are so many instant things that you didn't expect, like the lightning in the sky and the snow falling down from the roof. So how can you finally arrange your stories, like keep balance with your research and your surprises? You know, I mean, I think for me, this is what I love about documentary. It's so crazy, magic, unexpected, like her mother was speaking to us, the roof with that snow, and then like, ah, I'm going to get it. That kind of thing that happens, it's so powerful when you're doing it. You know, I looked, I had filmed for Michael Moore, and he said, use anything you want. And then I remembered, for some reason, I remembered this moment of Abdul biting his lip. I said, I want to go look for that footage. So I found that footage, and I found it very meaningful, emotional, but in the making of this film, I didn't, the same producer who said, stop, you have to stop editing, she said, I'm not going to allow you to go back to every person who is in the film to ask for their permission, because we will never get this film made. You get the permission from the directors, that's it, because I wanted to show it to everyone. So I hadn't shown the film to Abdul, and then he came and saw the movie, and he said, do you know, I had not decided not to go back to Iraq. And this is a court-martialable offense. He can be taken to prison for not going back to Iraq. He said he decided in that moment, he had like a vision of Muhammad Ali saying to him, why do you not stand up for your principles? And he said that, and then he bit his lip. And I was like, how cool is this, that somehow, 10 years after I filmed it, I remember, without even knowing what it means to him, that this moment is a deep moment. You can feel it in the footage, but I had no idea that for him, this was the moment. And this is what I think is sort of weird and magical about documentary and about trying to really pay attention to people, is that it's there. Even if you don't understand what's going on inside of them, there are signals that they are giving out. So this is part of how I organized it in this very intuitive, emotional way. Shooting is very intuitive. Yeah, shooting is by necessity. You're like, okay, right? Hi, Kirsten. Hi. I have two questions. My first question is about the newborn in Africa, what happened to that baby at last? And my second question is, how do you define the role of a camera person when it comes to moments like when you shoot the two children playing with the axe? If I try to help the children, you may miss the most precious footage that you want to shoot. But if you don't help them, maybe they will, you know, dangers may occur, you know. So how do you define your role? This is the nature of the dilemma, right? And I think you will notice I very purposely did not tell you what happens to the baby, right? It's very purposeful that it is left with a question mark because I don't want this struggle and this situation to be resolved because this is like for me, I realized working on that, that this is a battlefield. Poor people trying to get healthcare, like young healthy women are dying for no reason. There's blood. It is like a battlefield and yet we are only giving honor to soldiers and we are not giving honor to like the women who are in this battlefield of poverty. And it's an ongoing battle. And what's true in that scene is if you know certain things, you know the answer of what happened to that baby. But if you don't know things like I didn't know, I've never seen, I hadn't seen a baby being born then. I didn't understand. In your naivete, you have hope, right? You want, you want, it's a movie. If I keep filming, there'll be a happy ending, which is what I kept doing with that baby, right? I kept filming like somehow if I keep filming, it's going to be all right. I leave you in your literalism to do more work. When you look back at old footage, was there anything that you discovered you'd misremembered? So much. That's a great question. So much. And that was actually why I went back to look at footage because I was like, I don't know what's true anymore. I don't know what, I couldn't really remember anything, honestly. And there were many instances where it was more emotional for me what I had experienced than what was in the footage. But for example, the moment of that chain that dragged James Byrd Jr. to his death, I remember at the time I was like, oh, this carpet's ugly. I hate that plastic box. I filmed this in this terrible way. That's what was going on in my head. And then you hear that chain and it's like all the racism of America dropping this sound. And I was like, oh, this is powerful footage. It's not what it looks like. It's what it sounds like, right? So I discovered new things in looking at the footage, yeah. Yeah, but my memory is very faulty. I can promise you. When you are a camera person, you're shooting, you're trying to get the picture right. Your attention is spread out into so many things, the technical things, you know. And sometimes you're not really looking at that and you're certain kind of detached to that footage. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, it's interesting. I think you keep using the word detached and I rebel a little bit from it. But I think for me sometimes it's like it's so deeply emotional what you're filming that you know if you let yourself engage completely, you will collapse or you will cry so hard you can't do the focus. So then you're like, okay, I got to get the battery. Yeah, baby's dying, got to get the battery. So it's a way of allowing yourself to stay in it and to keep filming, I think. So for me, it's not detachment. It's like hanging on. Hanging on. Yeah. Hi. I wanted to ask, how was it different when you were working at home in the States in your own culture than working in other places, the war-torn places where you don't know the culture? What an interesting question. I mean, the truth is I think we all have homes that we don't know yet. And when we get there, we're like, oh, my people. Like, you know, the guy in Uganda who dances with his face, it's like, you're my people. Like, we were like, ah, ah, ah. You know, like, that's my, like, I connect to you. We don't speak the same language. We don't have the same experience, culture, whatever. But we really like to do this crazy thing, and we connect. Sometimes you're in your own culture. You speak the same language, but you go into a home where there's extreme violence. It is so unfamiliar, at least to me. Like, I'm one of the lucky people who had a childhood that was free from violence. And you go into a home that is full of violence in your own country, in your own language. It's like a foreign country, right? So I think, you know, there's all these ways in which we have identities. We have multiple identities. And sometimes they allow us to connect across country, nationality, blah, blah, blah, right? And then sometimes they don't. And sometimes you're completely missing it. So I think, if anything, you have an arrogance in your own country. You think you know things, and you usually don't. And I hope, at least, you know, if you're going to a place where you don't speak the language, you're going with some understanding that you don't understand. I think, basically, you don't understand everywhere. And so that you are trying to pick up signals and be open so that if you treat nowhere as familiar, then you get surprised by some moments of like, oh, yeah, we do that same thing. But I think going in with no assumptions about what you know is the most interesting way to engage. Y'all are very, you're staying for this Q&A. You're like, dig in. Hi. I was just wondering, how has making this film impacted you, yourself? Has it changed the way you shoot? You mentioned that it was only after you made the film that you realized that you had like 25 years of pain that you never processed. So, yeah, how has it changed? I mean, yeah, thank you. I mean, it's definitely, making this film definitely helped me process a lot and helped me acknowledge the ethical almost impossibility of the work, like the literal impossibility of trying to represent the lives of others and how often you misrepresent other people. And coming to sort of admit some of that as opposed to trying to deny that that's in the work, that's changed me. But I think that to be a camera person, you have to be really in the present. And this work was very much a work of time travel. It was going past present future all the time. And I think in some ways there's no other way to shoot than I shoot, which is sort of giving my whole heart, mind, body while I am present. But you're missing things. And learning to accept that you are missing things and you misunderstand things is part of what it is to shoot or to film. I'm trying to change all the language. I don't want to shoot anybody anymore. I don't want to take any images anymore. I don't want to get anything anymore. We have to come up with new vocabulary, right? Maybe there's some better, maybe you have better words in Cantonese for filming people. I don't know. You let me know. I just want to ask you one question. How were you able to communicate with your producers and the people who helped you with this movie? Because I think there's a lot of information embedded and there's a lot of ideas you tried to incorporate in that movie. How were you able to get that done with the help of a lot of people? Yeah, absolutely. Well, I worked with some really smart people and really patient people because they let me keep saying, I really want to include this and I really want to include that. But also, you know, there's a moment I had this scene I really wanted to include and the producer and the editor were like, why? Why is this scene so important? And I would sort of come up with an answer and they'd say, really? And they'd be like, does the movie really need this? And at a certain point I was like, you know what? The movie doesn't need it. I needed it. And it was about ego and it was about making sure that people understood that I was, you know, I'm a white person but I care about racism. You know, it was ego. It was like, let me show you how I am. And they just kept being like, really? The movie really need it? So that I felt very not protected in the movie. By the end I was like, I got all kinds of stuff in this movie. Some of it's ugly. Some of it's wrong. Some of it's embarrassing. Some of it is, you know, all of those things, owning that that was me was what they helped me to do which was really... What happened to that boy that you interviewed in Afghanistan? Are you still in contact with him? Oh my goodness, his story is so incredible. Najeeb actually got a scholarship to come to a super Christian college in the United States and it has messed with his mind so deeply. I can't even tell you. He makes like no sense right now. He first got to go to a British private school where he was bullied terribly. And then he got brought to the United States and where all of these young kids were trying to convert him to Christianity. And whoo, he has got a journey ahead of him. He is still on the journey and still deeply confused about his place in the world. But he's safe and he's getting an education, that's for sure. Yeah. But he comes and visits my kids and plays with them and they're like, whoo, Najeeb is weird. I'm like, yep. He's gonna be so for a while. But I think he's gonna get through it. I think he's a libertarian right now. Yeah. Life is full of surprises. So I would just like to ask you, do you think you're changing the person because when you interview his story or her story, do you think you're playing a part in his or her life? Do you think I'm playing a part in your life right now? No, for real, right? It's happening, right? Yeah. You'll remember this moment. I don't know what it means to you or what it will mean to you. It's impossible for me to know. But once you do this with a person, then something is happening and it's very real and you don't know what the consequences of it are. So yes, I think, I really think that images are relationships. So that if I was filming you now, there would be all kinds of things happening between us and then you and I would go our separate way. Then there would be an image on the screen. You could watch it in the future. I could watch it in the future. Your children could watch it in the future. My children could watch it in the future, right? And this is the ongoing relationship that is an image. Yeah. And also I'm just wondering because like for, I think one of the story you're telling the mother that, oh, you're not a bad person. Don't think it this way or thing. Like, yeah. Do you think? Yeah. I'm just curious, like, do you think like for a documentary filmmaker or thing, you should stand? Yeah. Stand away, right? Do you think you're going a bit too far? Getting too close to you and to you. I'm getting way too close to you. I'm much, much too close to you. You know, I mean, in a situation like that, you know, in the United States, there's this terrible battle that rages around abortion. And here was this young woman who came in completely alone, you know, is battling like first woman in her family to go to college, you know, has had a baby and knows she can't support a second child and is beating herself up. And, you know, as I see it, like the whole political system in the United States is stacked against her and she's blaming herself. And so you can leave her alone in that moment. But why? Right? Like, what does it change to say, I feel you, I had an abortion too. I know this is a really hard decision. I'm sorry that you are so scared. Like, why can't you say that? Thank you. All right. Yeah. So my question is kind of after experiencing all of this kind of either morally kind of questionable or ethical kind of like questionable situations, like, how do you kind of, what's your moral compass? Like, what do you take out of it? Like, how do you stay happy? Like, do you get depressed? Like, how does that affect you? Like, how do you kind of, I don't know, work through it? Well, I mean, I think like definitely this film was a way of working through it. And I think that, you know, just because something is ethically complicated doesn't mean that then you abdicate yourself from the complication. Like, you know, so it's like because, right, we have this human contact and then I blew it and I said something deeply offensive to you and I hurt you or I made you really angry. And then I realized that, okay, now what do I do? Do I apologize but the apology isn't enough because it's part of systemic discrimination and like I'm an idiot and I know nothing and you have to educate me one more time. And then I realized that two months later, like, ah, you educated me again. Then I try to be, you know, so I think that this is the thing that we all really have to engage in because we all know stuff is messed up. It's really messed up. And we all know that we don't know everything and we're all really afraid to make mistakes. I mean, I don't know to what degree you all are living in the world of identity politics here but like we certainly are in the United States, right? And I would bet you are in this place, right? And it's, you gotta, you will make mistakes. You can then attempt to understand them. You can attempt to apologize. You can, you know, make mistakes and they will never be forgiven. All of those things happen but then, so then it's like, do I just keep hurtling into things and always be naive? Hopefully not, right? Hopefully you learn a little bit, right? So all of, but to expect yourself to understand all of it immediately and never make any mistakes and always be ethical, this is to not see yourself as human and also to be deeply arrogant because it's like, oh, I can understand everything ahead of time. No, you can't, right? So I think that's the thing. It's like in some ways like this extreme desire to always be ethical is an arrogance, right? It's a moral superiority and like you got stuff to learn. No matter who you are, no matter what your experience, you got some stuff to learn, right? And we all do and we all have blind spots and like sort of owning those I think is what becomes interesting, right? Hi. I just don't understand how you don't get yelled at by the boxer who's so angry at everybody but you're just smooth through the whole thing. Yeah, yeah. How did it happen? Well, I mean the thing is that whenever you're filming you have to ask yourself why is someone letting themselves be filmed, right? And then how, the first time I had ever seen him was when he was warming up and I was there with like, I was on his team. Like, you know what I mean? I was there trying to be respectful of him warming up and I think he could feel like I was with him and so when he came back he was so angry and I think when I, earlier in my career I would have followed him straight into the bathroom and I probably would have gotten the camera knocked out but I, and later in my life I would have stopped filming but I just, I was like let me wait and either he'll come out or he won't come out and he knows there's a chance I'll be here if he comes out and so when he came out you can see like he hesitates like does he want me there or not want me there but I looked at him like I'm sorry, like I wanted him to win like I think he could see in my face I wanted him to win too. Didn't that just make him more angry? I don't know, you know, it was funny when he saw the footage he was like I'd never hit a female like, you know, he was like but I did think he, he had a moment I think he had a moment where he might have but are you kidding me? I was ready to get hit for that shot, right? I mean, yeah. I was wondering, did you just cut up some of the images? Yeah, no, I mean I think there's some, like I don't think you should be ready to die for a shot but I think, you know, a slight injury for a shot perhaps, yeah. Thank you. Catherine, you want to wrap it up? Yes, I think we should thank Kirsten. Now I'm comfortable. Thank you very much, Kirsten.