INTRODUCTION
Daniel A. Swarthnas (Cinema Parenthèse)

IMAGES OF ASIAN MUSIC
(A DIARY FROM LIFE 1973-74)
Peter Hutton
Thailand | 1974 | 16mm | b&w | silent | 26'00
Images of Asian Music represents footage compiled during 1973-
1974 when Peter Hutton was living in Thailand and working at sea as a merchant seaman. While the film is silent, the title was intended to evoke a comparison to the movement of classical Asian music. Images of Asian Music is a personal celebration of Asia formed by a sensitivity to filmic composition and to the perception of these images in a silent time created by the filmmaker.

A DEPRESSION IN THE BAY OF BENGAL
Mark LaPore
Sri Lanka | 1996 | 16mm | color | sound | 28'00
LaPore went to Sri Lanka with the idea that he would remake Basil Wright's and John Grierson's 1934 documentary Song of Ceylon. After spending three months there he realized just how impossible that would be. Wright's film was formally innovative and visually brilliant but his experience was not to be revisited. Each of the places he filmed still exist, but thirteen years of ethnic war have colored the way in which those places can be portrayed. LaPore has made a film about traveling and living in a distant place which looks at aspects of daily life and where the war shadows the quotidian with a dark and rumbling step.

THE FIVE BAD ELEMENTS
Mark LaPore
Sudan/Bengal | 1997 | 16mm | b&w | sound | 32'00
The Five Bad Elements is a dark and astringent film that allows the filmmaker's personal subconscious drives and the equivocal bad conscience of ethnography to bleed through into overt content.

Total 86'00

PETER HUTTON (1944-2016) was an American experimental filmmaker, and one of cinema’s most ardent and poetic portraitists of city and landscape. A former merchant seaman, he has spent nearly 40 years voyaging around the world, often by cargo ship, to create sublimely meditative, luminously photographed, and intimately
diaristic studies of place, from the Yangtze River to the Polish industrial city of Lodz, and from northern Iceland to a ship graveyard on the Bangladeshi shore.

Hutton also worked as a professional cinematographer, most notably for his former student Ken Burns, as well as cinematography for Lizzie Borden's "Born in Flames," Sheila McLaughlin and Lynne Tillman's "Committed," assorted films by artist Red Grooms and Albert Maysles' The Gates.

MARK LAPORE (1952-2005) was an experimental ethnographic filmmaker who made several films in the Sudan, India and Sri Lanka, as well as various parts of the U.S. over a period of nearly thirty years. A dedicated iconoclast and personal artist, LaPore strove to document and portray the cultures with which he connected in ways that were true to his experiences as a traveler as well as being honest reflections of people and scenes that he was witnessing. LaPore worked against conventions of ethnographic narrative, using cinema at its most fundamental level as an objective tool that could also be harnessed for personal response and expression. He was also an influential teacher at the Massachusetts College of Art, and many of his students have gone on to become significant filmmakers in their own right. LaPore's tragic and premature death on September 11, 2005, robbed American independent cinema of one of its most original and dedicated talents. - Steve Anker