It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

Do you believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to The Next Picture Show, a movie The Week podcast devoted to a classic film

and the way it shaped our thoughts on a recent release.

I'm Keith Phipps here again with Scott Tobias, Genevieve Koske, and Tasha Robinson.

In our last episode, we talked about Orson Welles' 1973 film F for Fake, a not quite documentary

about forger's, authenticity, and the

meaning of art. This week, we're bringing in Dick Johnson is Dead, in which Kirsten Johnson

documents the decline of her father, with occasional breaks to stage his death and depict his

afterlife in heaven. Dick Johnson is dead as Kirsten Johnson's second film as the director,

but, like its predecessor,

the work of someone with a long history-making movies. Her first directorial effort,

Camerperson, woven together scraps of footage from her years as a documentary cinematographer into a kind of memoir made up of outtakes from throughout her career. With Dick Johnson is

dead, she pushes the autobiographical instinct even further. When her father, psychiatrist

Richard Johnson, is diagnosed with dementia, she decides to turn his decline into a project

by staging his death for the camera with his enthusiastic participation. What follows is a

rumination on memory, movie illusions, death, and what remains after we're gone. We'll talk it over after the break.

Just the idea that I might ever lose this man is too much to bear.

He's my dad.

Let's start walking to start walking to me.

That's fantastic. I suggested we make a movie about him dying.

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