Images of Asian Music (A Diary from Life 1973-74)

“Cinema tends to be this additive thing, it gets more complicated technologically… I wanted to do it alone, keep it personal and private. Almost like making sketchbooks. The more I kept it simple the more I could work… It’s not about the pyrotechnics, it’s about something else—being inventive with limitations.” – Peter Hutton, 2012

Peter Hutton's early film Images of Asian Music (A Diary from Life 1973-74) was shot while he was living in Thailand and working as a merchant seaman, bringing together material filmed over two years across South East Asia. Elegiac in tone, the beautifully composed silent black and white images are attentive to the rhythms of life across the region, foregrounding passed over details and capturing the movement of people against the background of shifting political territories of the time, the film shifts from glimpses of pre-Pol Pot Phnom Penh to moments caught amongst fleeting encounters at sea. His work throughout his life would seek moments of intense observation, finding the right entry point or distance to look at places and their history. Reflecting on time he spent in central Europe in the 1980s he described himself as 'a spy stealing dead history with my Bolex.'