INDOCHINE OCCUPIED (ENCORE)
Young Gabriel Veyre, epitome of the far-flung Lumière operator, organised screenings and the filming of vues in New York, Mexico, Guadeloupe, Cuba, Venezuela, Martinique and Colombia in 1896-1897, as well as in Canada and Japan in 1898. On his way back to France he visited China and came to Hanoi in April 1899. There Paul Doumer, governor of French Indochina, commissioned him to make films and an extensive photographic record of the colonies under his administration for the 1900 Paris Exposition. Veyre stayed in Indochina for nearly a year. The venue where Veyre’s films were screened in Paris from 15 April to 12 November 1900 was a cave-like temple of reinforced concrete underneath the Cambodian pagoda-pavilion; the photographs are not mentioned in the final report of the Expo but we can assume that they were indeed on display since Doumer was the main organiser of the five Indochina pavilions. The catalogue of the colonial section of the Exhibition reads like a textbook example of fake news, assuring the public that occupation is for the best of the occupied people. The French occupation of Indochina started in 1857 and by 1893 the countries we now know as Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were under colonial rule. As colonial occupiers do, the French imposed forced labour and ever-increasing taxes, which robbed the peasant population of land and crops, transforming them into a landless labour-force for the mines, plantations and building sites, where they suffered unbearable working conditions and malnutrition. A selection of Veyre’s films from occupied Indochina combined with Peter Hutton’s silent Images of Asian Music – A Diary from Life 1973-74 made up a programme on the opening afternoon of the 2019 Il Cinema Ritrovato. The experiment produced such a strong impression that we decided to repeat it, with some changes to the Veyre selection, and with more works by Hutton scheduled in the 16mm section.

Mariann Lewinsky

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