HENRI PLAAT: FILMMAKING AS ‘AN EXPLODED HOBBY’  
Henri Plaat (1936) is a visual artist and creator of graphic work, drawings, gouaches and collages. After his premature departure from school he enrolled in the University of Applied Arts to study typography. Feeling limited by the course, he soon began to draw and took an interest in the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt and Mayan culture. His personal memories of World War II and newsreels influenced his work to develop a unique code to rebel against reality: “Humour is an antidote to the fear of terrible things”. He picked up a camera in 1966 and started to make films first on 8mm and later on 16mm. Plaat’s interest lies in the interplay between the imaginary and the real, as shown by his use of light and colour, movement and stillness as well as sound and music. In his shorter filmic performances, he adapts photo montages with opera and song, juxtaposing Wagner and Zarah Leander with war sounds and aircraft noise. Using the tactics of the absurd, Plaat playfully examines the theatrical and the quality of wonder often through associative improvisation, contrasted by the crude reality of the haunting wars that ravaged Europe. His eclectic travelogues are fantastical elegies venturing into dream-like archaeological expeditions – to Latin America, India, Greece and North America – with a focus on derelict landscapes and dilapidated beauty. His gaze on fallen empires and the melancholy of ancient greatness is both nostalgic and embodies the urge for truthfulness, to learn from the origins and to conserve this sentiment for future humanity. Plaat’s decision to work on film was strongly motivated by the visual qualities of Kodachrome and Tri-X reversal stocks, which were able to translate his preference for light, shadow and colour.

Marius Hrdy

PETER HUTTON: “I WANTED TO KEEP EVERYTHING SIMPLE”
I often don’t even think of myself as a filmmaker in the classical sense of making films. Because they’re really just observations; they’re sort of notes on looking at things that interest me in the world. They’re very simple; nothing too complicated going on.

Peter Hutton, 2011

Peter Hutton is the filmmaker who helps us to improve our senses of seeing. His films are guided by his dedication to revealing stillness in motion and motion in stillness. One can classify his oeuvre into three different genres: portraits of landscapes, portraits of cities and cinematic travelogues. In this year’s selection we picked out our favourite film of each of these genres. Study of a River is the sole example of his landscape film, where he connects the motion of the captured image perfectly with the stillness of his shots and vice versa. In this film Hutton definitely levels his artistic mastery with photographs of Ansel Adams and the best landscape paintings of the Hudson River School. See Study of a River and experience the strong effect cinema can evoke with just a man and his movie camera. Hutton’s cinematic portraits of cities are also strongly connected to the art of photography. New York, which Hutton portrayed in his trilogy New York Portrait I-III, is one of the most photographed cities on earth. It was a major subject for many of the most influential photographers of the classic era of blackand- white film photography (including Helen Levitt and Alfred Stieglitz). Nobody ever captured the Big Apple like Peter Hutton did, though. He was definitely influenced by the master photographers, but his work adds the magic of the movement. At Il Cinema Ritrovato we will screen the second part of the trilogy, because in this film Hutton highlights a social issue – a rare choice for him at this time. By showing poor people in the streets he locates his work closer to that of documentary photographers such as Jacob August Riis. That connection may sound strange at first, but it is definitely appropriate in relation to New York Portrait – Chapter 2. As an example of his cinematic travelogues we present again Images of Asian Music (A Diary from Life 1973-74), a contemplative record of Hutton’s time as a Marine in south-east Asia. This rather long work is one of his diary-based films such as his famous July 71 in San Francisco, Living at Beach Street, Working at Canyon Cinema or Swimming in the Valley of the Moon (not in the programme). Hutton described this part of his oeuvre as “diaristic without being autobiographical”. I would add that it is the visual diary of somebody who is able to see and capture the beauty in everything – even a major conflagration, as in Boston Fire, which is the Hutton film in the selection that has the strongest link to early cinema.

Karl Wratschko