Cameraperson, on Entaglement

There's a scene in Cameraperson in which a physicist summarizes the law of quantum entanglement. It's a tiny scene, one brief moment among so many, but it unveils the heart of the film: Cameraperson serves as an embodiment of personal entanglement.

Kirsten Johnson's clips jump across space and time, not in a narrative sense, though perhaps a thematic one. Children at play are positioned alongside children suffering the pains of war. Life is shown, as life so painfully is, intermingled with death.

But through it all, and in the jumping, Johnson lofts an idea: that we truly are intertwined. That what happens in one place inevitably and irreversibly affects others across the world. Decisions toward war find their causality creating tragic injuries, even deaths. The pain of aging holds hands with the pain of those who died young. The beauty and terror of lightning in a Missouri plain, the beauty and terror of a small child playing with a hatchet.

Johnson, using real-world footage, crafts a film about what we see, what we hear, what we remember, what we give, and what we share. It expresses creation as continuation, depicting both the symmetries and asymmetries of the world.

From it, we see that injustice can be a habit, a reflex. It repeats itself, becoming an entire way of being. But Cameraperson posits that perhaps devotion can become a habit, too, reforming that world to bear witness and honor to that beauty of persons and place.