Cinema Parenthèse and iMAL present Befoew We Knew Nothing, a series of six film programs featuring the work of Mark Lapore, Chick Strand, Peter Hutton, Diane Kitchen, Naomi Uman, and Nathaniel Dorsky, whose varied practices are centred on ethnographic and anthropological studies. These programs of personal travels focus on the discovery and revealing of places, landscapes, people, and encounters with social, political and cross-cultural differences.
The viewer meets an agricultural Mexican family in California, which struggles with economic difficulties while trying to navigate a complex environment of immigrant working life and cultural alienation (Naomi Uman), pictures of people, landscapes and urban places in Sri Lanka, Bengal, Calcutta and New York (Mark LaPore), a portrait of the Asháninka people who live in the tropical forest of eastern Peru, and a reflection on the experience of living and filming among those who continue to resist the standards of the modern world (Diane Kitchen). Extraordinary land, sea, and cityscapes and faces of working seamen in Thailand and New York (Peter Hutton), female factory workers and feminist reflections and stories of colonialism in Venezuela depicted from an older female Warao Indian perspective, a nun and the filmmaker herself (Chick Strand).
The camera positioning, the composition of the image space, the pro-filmic (everything that is in front of and recorded by the camera), things outside the frame (off-screen), the soundtrack and political and cultural discrepancies are crucial problems for these filmmakers' positions in the choice of representation. Dealing with history and freeing the binary opposition between me and you and us and them as something foreign, are also vital approaches in the production of these films.
March 25th, 2022, 19:00, iMALBefore We Knew Nothing I: Peter Hutton & Mark Lapore- Introduction, by 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)- A Depression In The Bay Of Bengal (Mark LaPore, Sri Lanka, 1996, 16mm, color, sound, 28'00)- The Five Bad Elements (Mark LaPore, Sudan/Bengal, 1997, 16mm, b&w, sound, 32'00)
March 25th, 2022, 21:00, iMALBefore We Knew Nothing II: Naomi Uman- Introduction, by Daniel A. Swarthnas (Cinema Parenthèse)- Leche (Mexico, 1998, 16mm, b&w, sound, 30'00)- Mala Leche (USA, 2003, 16mm, color, sound, 47'00)
March 26th, 2022, 19:00, iMALBefore We Knew Nothing III: Chick Strand- Introduction, by Daniel A. Swarthnas (Cinema Parenthèse)- Mosori Monika (Venezuela, 1970, 16mm, color, sound, 20'00)- Fake Fruit Factory (Mexico, 1986, 16mm, color, sound, 22'00)- Anselmo And The Women (Mexico, 1986, 16mm, color, sound, 35'00)
March 26th, 2022, 21:00, iMALBefore We Knew Nothing IV: Diane Kitchen- Introduction, by Daniel A. Swarthnas (Cinema Parenthèse)- Before We Knew Nothing (Peru, 1988, 16mm, color, sound, 62'00)- Roots, Thorns (Peru, 1992, 16mm, color, sound, 23'00)
March 27th, 2022, 19:00, iMALBefore We Knew Nothing V: Mark Lapore- Introduction, by Daniel A. Swarthnas (Cinema Parenthèse)- The Glass System (Bengal/Usa, 2000, 16mm, color, sound, 20'00)- Mekong (Thailand/Burma, 2002, 16mm, b&w, silent, 10'00)- Kolkata (North Kolkata, 2005, 16mm, b&w, sound, 35'00)
March 27th, 2022, 21:00, iMALBefore We Knew Nothing VI: Nathaniel Dorsky & Peter Hutton- Introduction, by Daniel A. Swarthnas (Cinema Parenthèse)- Ingreen (Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 1964, 16mm, color, sound, 12'00)- A Fall Trip Home (Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 1964, 16mm, color, sound, 11'00)- Summerwind (Nathaniel Dorsky, USA, 1965, 16mm, color, sound, 14'00)- New York Near Sleep For Saskia (Peter Hutton, USA, 1972, 16mm, b&w, silent, 8'00)- New York Portrait - Part I (Peter Hutton, USA, 1979, 16mm, b&w, silent, 16'00)- New York Portrait - Part II (Peter Hutton, USA, 1982, 16mm, b&w, silent, 11'00)- New York Portrait - Part III (Peter Hutton, USA, 1990, 16mm, b&w, silent, 17'00)
Entrance: Single screening 4€/6€, Weekend pass 20€ (cash only)
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
Naomi Uman is an experimental filmmaker and a visual artist, currently living in Mexico City. Her work is often marked by her signature handmade aesthetic, often shooting, hand-processing and editing her films with the most rudimentary of practices. Her films clearly reveal her relationship to the subject, always recognizing the deforming presence of the camera. There is an intimacy to her work which often focuses on women and their role in their society.
Chick Strand (1931-2009) accomplishments as an artist spanned more than three decades. In the early 1960s, with a new anthropology degree in hand, she turned her attention to ethnographic filmmaking. Her early work focused on Meso-American cultures explored through the language of the experimental documentary.
In 1961, she founded Canyon Cinema with Bruce Baillie, an organization that, in 1965, spawned the San Francisco Cinematheque. They organized screenings of experimental, documentary and narrative films in East Bay backyards and community centers. Acting in response to a lack of public venues for independent movies, they were part of a wider explosion in American avant-garde film. The era was one of social idealism and communal energy, and the films they showcased boldly embraced purely cinematic visual expression and cultural critique.
Strand left Northern California in the late 1960s to pursue studies in ethnographic film at UCLA. She then joined the faculty of Occidental College, where she served as the director of the film as art program for a quarter of a century. In the 1970s she continued to define her visual technique, and her subjects more frequently became women. She soon evolved a distinctive film style: backlit subjects photographed in close up and in motion, with a handheld telephoto lens. The technique produced sensual, lyrical images that became Strand's signature. Her entire filmography numbers nearly a score of works, and along the way, she also become an accomplished photographer and painter.
Diane Kitchen (Scholar, Lecturer and Filmmaker) retired from UWM in 2011 after teaching in the Peck School of the Arts Film Department for 27 years. She taught film production, editing and sound with an emphasis on experimental approaches, cross-cultural aesthetics, and forms of perception illumined through the moving image. Kitchen also managed UWM’s Cinema Arts Archive from 1995 to 2011.
Her work in film bridges documentary, personal expression and cultural commentary. Two experimental documentaries, "Before We Knew Nothing" and "Roots, Thorns", were filmed with the Asháninka people in the Amazon Basin of eastern Peru. A series of films centering on observations of the natural world include "Wot the Ancient Sod", "Notch", "Quick’s Thicket", "Ecstatic Vessels", and "Videe". "The Penfield Road" and Horse Song address the American cultural landscape.
Nathaniel Dorsky, born in New York City in 1943, is an experimental filmmaker and film editor who has been making films since 1963. He has resided in San Francisco since 1971.
“In film, there are two ways of including human beings. One is depicting human beings. Another is to create a film form which, in itself, has all the qualities of being human: tenderness, observation, fear, relaxation, the sense of stepping into the world and pulling back, expansion, contraction, changing, softening, tenderness of heart. The first is a form of theater and the latter is a form of poetry.”- Nathaniel Dorsky
"The films of Nathaniel Dorsky blend a beauteous celebration of the sensual world with a deep sense of introspection and solitude. They are occasions for reflection and meditation, on light, landscape, time and the motions of consciousness. Their luminous photography emphasizes the elemental frisson between solidity and luminosity, between spirit and matter, while his uniquely developed montage permits a fluid and flowing experience of time. Dorsky's films reveal the mystery behind everyday existence, providing intimations of eternity."- Steve Polta
