DICK JOHNSON IS DEAD ***1/2
IDEA: After her father, Dick Johnson, starts exhibiting early symptoms of dementia, documentarian Kirsten Johnson decides to cast him in a movie in which he dies, repeatedly and often outrageously.
BLURB: It’s a feature of Kirsten Johnson’s latest memoir-cum-filmic interrogation that by its end, viewers are apt to wonder if Dick Johnson is, in fact, dead. This ontological question is one fundamentally entwined with cinema, a medium capable of preserving reality and restoring loss, masking temporal absence with perceptual presence. Death escapes representation; nobody really dies on film, especially not Dick Johnson. Rather, the boisterous octogenarian’s multiple, morbidly staged “deaths” only serve to underscore his continuing corporeal existence. Following each freak accident, he is “resurrected” by the film apparatus, and sent to a movie-constructed heaven to live out his life for blissful eternity. All, of course, made possible by his daughter’s cinematic trickery, which becomes through her Seventh-day Adventist theology a droll, probably blasphemous analog of Jesus’ divine powers. If this all seems rather fetishistic, that’s because it is. Yet most of what seems garish, sordid, or mollifying about the Johnsons’ project is a byproduct of the film’s honest, messy grappling with human mortality, and the role photographic-based media play in how we relate to memory and loss. The repetitious restaging of this primal fantasy is not done to disavow or ward off death, but to creatively rehearse it within the imaginary space granted by film - indeed, to take advantage of this essential ability. Even when Dick Johnson is dead, all we’ll know is his presence.
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