Dick Johnson Is Dead

synopsis

Charles Richard Johnson, known to all as Dick, is a psychiatrist, father of the film’s director, and a man in the twilight of his life. Death could come for him at any moment. So what is there to fear? And why not have some fun with it? The attempt to turn an often traumatic experience into something positive defines the poetics of a documentary about a person’s serious and not-so-serious final affairs. Staging the possible and highly curious deaths of an old man becomes one of the many games Dick and Kirsten play together throughout their lives, as the dementia that gradually consumes the man's mind can end his life even before his definitive end.

“Part of how humans function is thanks to a healthy death denial, certainly—most humans can function for a great period of their lives in a healthy denial that they will die, that a death would be out of the norm, would be an accident, or could be self-inflicted.”

Quote source: Mubi

biography

Kirsten Johnson (1965) is an American filmmaker who has worked as a cinematographer on a number of successful documentaries (e.g. Citizenfour, 2014). The audience at Ji.hlava had the opportunity to get acquainted with Kirsten in 2012, when she gave a masterclass on her approach to visual style in documentary film.

more about film

director:

Kirsten Johnson