The Chinese Typewriter (1978-1983) by Daniel Barnett
Thursday, October 1, 1987, 8:00 pm
Cultural Anatomies
The four films included on tonight’s program offer different but concentrated responses by the filmmakers to other cultures. In each film a more disturbingly ambiguous relationship of the filmmaker to place and “exotic” culture is established than in the usual travel or diary films. Lenin Portrait by Peter Hutton is a quiet and mysterious record of Moscow life; Hungarian Diaries: Funeral of Mozart by András Szirtes, the Hungarian filmmaker’s reaction to peasant and working-class life in Budapest; Poor Young People by Medora Ebersole, a meditation on the contrast between Peru’s culture and our own; and The Chinese Typewriter by Daniel Barnett, a dense and sensually rich re-working of sounds and super-8 images recorded in China.