Unless you’re a mythical combination of Chicagoan, filmmaker, and film industry interrogator, you might not know the works and personage of one Peter Kuttner. A fifty-year veteran of the film industry and native of Chicago, Kuttner has work on over one hundred films: one hundred and nine to be specific, including working on a few of the legendary John Hughes’s projects. These films span innumerable genres, from lighthearted family films and teen comedies to blockbuster action films and prestige television. This vast filmography is due to one significant detail; Kuttner is primarily a camera tech and assistant cameraman.
The noble work of the tech and assistant for cinematographers and directors of photography is dreadfully understated, with people in these positions filling out second unit shot crews (all those fun shots in a film that require no actors and therefore no director FOR those actors) and performing all the shots that don’t require the hand of the more experienced cameramen. If that sounds a little confusing, think about how scenes are shot for a moment: in a simple shot reverse shot dialogue scene, you have at least two cameras on the actors. You could have more depending on the other extraneous shots you might capture of the actors present, but let’s focus on the two-camera setup. The primary camera operator monitors one of the cameras, alongside a monitor bank that gives feedback from all cameras used for the scene. You then have assistant operators working the secondary, tertiary, or even quaternary cameras.
This makes a singular contribution harder to see as an audience member. This is especially notable in film industry, seeming built on “Great Man Theory” as its raison d'etre. This is why you’ve probably never heard of good old Peter Kuttner unless you’re keyed into Chicago activism. His two crowning achievements are the documentaries The End of the Nightstick, an activist film about Chicago’s history of racially charged police violence, and Now we Live on Clifton, a gentrification-critical film about the expansion of DePaul University.
His fifty years in Chicago film behind the camera haven’t been for naught, despite the relative reclusiveness of his online activity and his public face. Kuttner currently sits on the board for Chicago Flimmakers, a non-profit organization focused on connecting, networking, and advancing the careers of filmmakers in the Chicagoland area, as well as supporting other camera techs as the representative to the governing board for the IATSE.
Peter Knutter has had a storied career, from Ferris Bueller to Man of Steel, from reporting on gentrification to fighting for the rights of fellow film workers. If you work in the industry in the Midwest, you owe some of your worker’s rights to Peter, whether you know it or not.