Peter Kuttner

Peter Kuttner is a Chicago filmmaker, activist, and cameraman. He is known for his early socially-conscious documentary films that touch on topics such as opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War, gentrification of Chicago, racism, and social class. He produced many of these with the film collective Kartemquin Films, of which he was an original member. He is best known for his work on the film The End of the Nightstick with Cindi Moran and Eric Scholl, which documented police brutality in Chicago and torture allegations against commander Jon Burge. Kuttner has worked extensively in activism and community service, and was a founding member of activist group Rising Up Angry. Kuttner has worked with many collaborators including Kartemquin Collective founder Gordon Quinn, and filmmakers Haskell Wexler and Robert Kramer. He is also known for camera work on a number of major motion pictures including Man of Steel and Source Code.

Early career Kuttner grew up in a middle-class neighborhood and attended public school near Wrigley Field in Chicago, Illinois. He attended college at Northwestern University, where he created the film Cause Without a Rebel (1965), a short documentary film about student political complacency on the Northwestern Campus. Kuttner graduated from Northwestern that same year in 1965.

In 1966 Kuttner was hired as a director at Chicago Television Station WTTW (Window to the World), a station that would eventually be owned by PBS. It was here that a visiting crew introduced Kuttner to the Cinéma vérité style of documentary filmmaking. There he made a small number of shows including the arts series "Facets". The group had connections to anti-war protestors David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, and Tom Hayden, who would eventually be named as part of the Chicago Seven conspiracy.

Kuttner opened a Chicago chapter of the group, recruiting 15 members, including Jon Jost, and established ties with local film collectives like Kartemquin and The Film Group. The Chicago branch functioned mostly as a distributor for the New York Headquarters. They also started production on two other films that were later damaged in a fire. One of the films, a documentary about the Black Panther Party's Illinois chapter's involvement in the Free Breakfast for Children program, was lost completely. The other was the film Trick Bag, which Kuttner would eventually restore during his time at Kartemquin. There, he wrote film reviews for the organization’s newspaper and helped organize their citywide free clinic. During his time there he worked on the films Hum 255, Trick Bag, and Now We Live on Clifton, and the Chicago Maternity Center Story (1976).

Trick Bag Trick Bag was a collaboration between Kartemquin, Columbia College Chicago, and Rise Up Angry. Peter Kuttner's connection to Rise Up Angry sparked the creation of the film, as it was originally a Newsreel project that had been left unfinished when the group dissolved. The film negatives were destroyed in a fire, but Kuttner helped restore it from the work print when he joined Kartemquin in 1972. The film features various conversations and interviews with youth, workers, and veterans around Chicago talking about race and class. Trick Bag went on to earn the Chicago International Film Festival "Merit Award".

The End of the Nightstick In 1994 Kuttner collaborated with Chicago Torture Justice, an organization dealing with the aftermath and recovery of brutality experienced at the hands of police officers like Jon Burge. Kuttner produced The End of the Nightstick (1994), a PBS P.O.V. broadcast, with Cyndi Moran and Eric Scholl. Kuttner has continued his work as a political activist through local activist groups and as a member of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Union, and as a board member of South Side Projections.

Commercial filmmaking Kuttner has contributed to a number of commercial productions in Chicago as a camera assistant. Some of these include Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), The Dark Knight (2008), Source Code (2011), Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011), Formosa Betrayed (2009), and the U.S. version of TV series Shameless. Others that were filmed in and around Chicago were Man of Steel (2013), Cheaper by the Dozen (2003), Proof (2005), The Break-Up (2006), Eagle Eye (2008), Traitor (2008), Barbershop 2: Back in Business (2004), and Mad Dog and Glory (1993).