Dick Johnson Is Dead: Falling Angels

In this opening scene, Dick tells us that, for him, film itself has always been about falling, an art that will be explored over the documentary’s duration as it pulls back the curtain on stunt work. Stunt performers and coordinators and effects designers help Johnson put her filmmaking plan into action: to stage her father’s death, with his consent, in multiple ways from realist—an adrenalized ambulance ride that recreates Dick’s actual cardiac arrest—to ridiculously cinematic, including such exaggerated hazards of walking down the street as being hit by a two-by-four or by an air conditioner falling from an apartment window. During one of the street shoots where a stuntman substitutes for him, Dick says to Kirsten: “You made that poor guy fall instead of me.” The film’s aim is thus not only to explode the illusion of verisimilitude but to examine the dual work on which it depends: the hard physical work of the performers and crew to enact it and the psychic work by the audience that demands and conjures it. Sometimes the latter is at the expense of someone’s risky performance of pain.

As with Cameraperson, our investment in looking is revealed by Johnson’s commitment to showing how film works. That earlier film offers an intimate history of contemporary American political documentary shaped by a loosely affiliated network committed to speaking truth to power—a network affiliated, not least, by Johnson herself, carrying her camera from location to location, and urgent issue to urgent issue, with filmmakers such as Laura Poitras, Michael Moore, Kirby Dick, Amy Ziering, and Dawn Porter. Her own film, drawing on footage from across her career as a cinematographer, stresses documentary’s never-more-urgent function of offering long-form investigation into and extensive oversight of complex issues, including war crimes (the PBS series Women, War & Peace, 2011); racism in America (Whitney Dow and Marco Williams’s Two Towns of Jasper, 2002); the illegal invasion of Afghanistan (Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, 2004); and the Guantánamo Bay detention camp (Laura Poitras’s The Oath, 2010).

Faces, voices, stories, and bodies register differently within Cameraperson than in the works from which its footage is taken. The film directs its inquiries into our compulsion to look through its astonishing attention to the body: Cameraperson is the furthest thing from a talking-heads documentary. Rather than the urgent validity of the arguments made by the original films, Cameraperson holds up the people themselves, often in the action or reaction of their bodies (a bent head, an eloquent hand gesture, a nervous tap of a cigarette on an ashtray)—these bodies’ fallibility, their humanity. It is also these gestures, along with repeated shapes of architecture and figures of the natural world, that link the subjects and stories together in what experimental filmmaker Maya Deren famously described as the vertical cascade of the film poem, rather than the horizontal line of an issue-led documentary. Yet Cameraperson does not eschew the material, the political, the specific; rather, it hybridizes them to approach a different vision of the real.

In a 2020 interview with Patricia Thomson for American Cinematographer about Dick Johnson Is Dead, Johnson noted: “We’re entering new territories of cinematic language, and this has to do with the fact that people who haven’t been allowed into the world of filmmaking are finally getting a chance at it. These realities are absolutely connected. It’s not like, ‘Oh, this is a new wave of hybridity.’ This is because there are more people making films who have been disenfranchised for too long.”

Hybridity is not a trend, Johnson suggests, but the result of documentary (continually) emerging in its authentic form as more filmmakers work outside controlling Euro-Western idées fixes such as “objectivity.” There is indeed a markedly feminist anticanon of such hybridity, including some of the more recent films that prompted critic and curator Luke Moody’s definitional taxonomy of the hybrid documentary in a 2013 essay, such as Gillian Wearing’s Self Made (2010), whose cinematic staging of its subjects’ memories and desires resonates with Dick Johnson Is Dead. Sarah Polley’s layered, sweet-bitter Stories We Tell (2012), documenting a family rich in performance skills and ambitions, and Agnès Varda’s lush and capacious biodoc The Beaches of Agnès (2008)—which sees Varda reimagine an early sexual encounter through the phantasmic analogy of a trapeze performance on a beach, among other stagings—are two even closer equivalents for their intermeshing of cinematic reflexivity and imbricated compassion.

“I want to break cinema,” Johnson told Guardian journalist Charles Bramesco on the film’s release in 2020. “I want to push it until it gives me back something that’s impossible.” In a heightened sequence later in the film that mixes actual and restaged footage of Dick getting confused during Halloween trick-or-treating, he opens a front door and finds himself in a (staged) haunted house. He is then drawn to another, forbidden door, and opens that. The viewer sees footage of an anonymous assisted-living facility, a reference to a fear of Dick’s, which itself relates to the time that Catherine Johnson, a.k.a. Katie Jo, his wife and Kirsten’s mother, spent in a care home. First the staged genre scene—albeit with a blanket over the sofa that is similar to one in Kirsten’s apartment—challenges the assumptions prompted by the grainy street footage of trick-or-treating, then documentary returns, piercing the staging with its vision of Dick’s true horror, stripped of all generic codes.

Woven through much of the film is Dick’s vision of a posthumous heaven, realized by Johnson and her team as a soundstage-shot musical extravaganza whose aesthetic is more Pierre et Gilles than Saint Peter, with Ahsan Ali’s Jesus giving long-lashed Conchita Wurst realness; Ali also appears masked as Bruce Lee, one of Dick’s heavenly dinner guests. This all-singing, all-dancing joyous vision, strong on pastel pinks, purples, and blues, is powerfully reminiscent of John Greyson’s hybrid operatic AIDS activist documentary, Fig Trees (2009), an implicit note of queer kinship coded as Jesus’s wink. Johnson explained to Patricia Thomson that the heaven sequence, shot over three days in August 2019, was one of the last to be filmed, and that its stylization also arose from necessity. By then, her father often became caught in repetition due to the progress of his dementia, although these loops could be illuminated by a split-second smile, or the brilliant light of his awareness. Her solution was to use a high-speed camera that shoots at a rate of 600 to 1,000 frames per second. The resulting slow-motion footage extended the length of her father’s responses and, in turn, influenced the design of the sequence: “Then we asked, ‘What’s going to work well in slow motion?’ That’s how we arrived at feathers, bubbles, and sequins.”

Feathers, bubbles, and sequins all fall; being light, they fall slowly, slowed further by the filming technique. Among them, Dick Johnson falls too. He falls gloriously, safely, surrounded by care not only when he is at home with his daughter but also when they are at work together: a rare behind-the-scenes vision of filmmaking as a care-led practice, informed by Johnson’s documentary practice. As Johnson told Charles Bramesco, “This is the question whenever you’re filming someone with less power than you. 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.”

Beyond Jesus, sequins, a tryout coffin, a heart-attack-inducing chocolate fudge cake, or even Katie Jo’s ashes (which recur from their role in Cameraperson), there is one key repeating trope that signals Dick’s agency and all the ways that the film not only makes space for it but is designed around it. His black leather Eames recliner first appears in his Seattle consulting office, where he worked as a psychiatrist for decades, up high in a skyscraper. It’s the first item to arrive to Kirsten’s one-bedroom New York apartment when he moves there—and it’s also brought to the set for the heaven shoot, a trace of familiarity and comfort that defines the space as Dick’s.

It’s a curious reminder of Henri Matisse’s 1908 statement in “Notes of a Painter” that “what I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art which could be for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.” Often considered a forerunner of art therapy, and seen as a devaluing and reifying of aesthetic practice, Matisse’s statement achieves a subversive dimension in Dick Johnson Is Dead in the film’s realization of the good armchair as a balm for both the terrors of dementia and the challenges of caring and of profoundly personal creative work—not least in the moment when we see Johnson herself taking advantage of the recliner on set.

Dick Johnson Is Dead is not devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, in the objective sense: it deals with death, dementia, and the disruption of a family. Johnson described the film in 2020 to critic Orla Smith at Seventh Row as “a cemetery,” a description that also holds true for Cameraperson, especially in its central litany of sites of massacres, a montage of long takes of abandoned or overgrown locales without human presence, unidentifiable except by the subtitles. Where Cameraperson documents imperial and state violence through its aftermath, Dick Johnson Is Dead imagines the aftermath—the grief and loss—by staging and restaging violence, questioning our investment therein by reminding us of what that investment is about: experiencing our own death. As Felix says insightfully after he’s been pushed on the rope swing, “That was so high, I almost died . . . I was too high, I love it!”

By centering the subjective intensity of life when facing up to death, the film finds a serenity that is admittedly and deliberately off-balance. Dick falls in slow motion—but then so, too, does dancer Michael Fatica, who performs masked as a young Dick in a wonderful heaven-set, formalwear Astaire and Rogers–style number to Rachel Eckroth’s “Bells.” At the end of the dance sequence, there is a shot of Fatica alone, formalwear switched out for casual shirt and pants, seemingly hanging in the air in a cabriolet, falling with infinite grace from the peak of his leap. His position in the shot echoes an earlier scene, the only one filmed in Kirsten’s apartment in which documentary is hybridized with effects, where Dick is asleep in his recliner and it slowly floats up from the floor, up out of frame. Heavy subject matter becomes light; falling becomes flying up to heaven. What if we could make space for aging and illness to be not declining but reclining, a gentle fall into necessary comfort and care?

Watching Dick Johnson Is Dead on its streaming release, I found myself—strangely—at ease. The consummate skill of the filmmaking, particularly its sense of timing, the awry timing that defines both comedy and tragedy, was part of that; the other was the affirmative experience of seeing care valued. This is something I’ve been thinking through with Raising Films, the UK-based campaign and community group for parents and carers in the screen industries that I cofounded in 2015, to highlight care-led filmmaking and fight for more. Alongside Isabel Sandoval’s Lingua Franca (2019), a fiction feature about a professional caregiver for the elderly, and Loira Limbal’s Through the Night (2020), a documentary feature about a twenty-four-hour day care (both set in New York, as much of Johnson’s film is), Dick Johnson Is Dead is one of the few films that speaks directly to what caring labor is, how it underlies everything—including all aspects of filmmaking, itself an act of care.