The experimental filmmaker Peter Hutton – all his movies are shot and exhibited on 16mm – recalls his time as a US Merchant Marine in south-east Asia. The film is shot in black and white and screened without sound. The film diary (in his own words, “diaristic without being autobiographical”) portrays a visit to a foreign culture and resembles therefore travelogues from the first years of filmmaking. It is not just the black-and-white film stock, the silence, the mapping of foreign culture and the static long takes that echo early cinema. The way that Hutton is able to transfer his fascination at capturing the world through a camera lens to the audience is infectious. This was the essence of early filmmaking, back in the first years after the movie camera was invented.

Karl Wratschko