Tuesday October 7th at 7:30PM
LOCATION: Carpenter Center, Harvard University.
24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Tickets: Suggested donation $7
Balagan and Film Study Center at Harvard University Present
Peter Hutton (Appearing in Person)
Peter Hutton is one of cinema's most ardent and poetic portraitists of city and landscape. A former merchant seaman, he has spent nearly forty 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.
Whether seeking remembrance of a city's fading past or reflecting on nature's fugitive atmospheric effects, Hutton sculpts with time; each film unfolds in silent reverie, with a series of extended single shots taken from a fixed position, harking back to cinema's origins and to traditions of painting and still photography. Among the works featured are the two magnificent series that Hutton began in the 1970s—one an impressionistic sketchbook of New York, and the other an exploration of the Hudson River Valley that transcribes and exalts landscape in the manner of Thomas Cole and the nineteenth-century Luminist painters. "Like the haiku of Bashô," the scholar Tom Gunning observes, "these seemingly simple films offer lessons in the art of seeing and fashioning images that make you wonder how anyone could produce something simultaneously so humble and so astounding." The exhibition opens on May 5 with Hutton in conversation with writer Luc Sante. All films are from the U.S. and directed by Hutton. (adapted from MoMA retrospective)
Program: (subject to change)
Note all films are silent 16mm
New York Portraits Part I. 1978–79 - Part II. 1980–81. - Part III. 1990
Hutton's sketchbook of mid-1970s New York, edited in three parts over twelve years, is a chronicle of indelible impressions and an act of urban archeology. The artist evokes the city's delicate rhythms, tonal contrasts, and shifts of scale—scrims of white mist and black smoke, of gauze, cloud, and fluttering pennant; the shadowy geometries of tenements and water towers; palimpsests of graffiti, skywriting, and painted signs; ecstatic sunlight glinting off the wings of homing pigeons as they traverse a pillowy sky; the slight rustle of a homeless man's shirt; the flowery patterns of rainwater draining from a flooded street; a blimp's lazy progress between two buildings whose balconies resemble film sprockets; and a winter fog rolling over the sandy rivulets of Coney Island, making of it a lunar park, removed from time.
In Titan's Goblet 10 min 1991.
Taking its title from a surreal Hudson River landscape painting by Thomas Cole circa 1833, In Titan's Goblet inscribes subtle patterns and movements of sky, sun, moon, and fire. Day becomes night, and night day, as the dawn's first light glimmers over a dark copse of trees, fleecy clouds pass like ice floes across the moon, and a bulldozer plows its way across an infernal valley of burning tires. 10 min.
Time and Tide. 1998–2000
Recalling John Ruskin's observation of J.M.W. Turner—"He paints in color but thinks in light and shade"—Hutton for the first time adds a wintry palette of opalescent blue-grays, greens, and ochres to his black-and-white tonalities, enlivened by splashes of eye-catching red and turquoise from the hulls of tankers, tug-barges, and cargo ships ambling their way up and down the Hudson. The film opens at a quickened pace with Billy Bitzer's 1903 time-lapse travelogue of maritime and manufacturing activity along the Hudson, then gives way to a meditation on the river's slow, sure rhythms; on brooding fog and sea smoke; and on counterpoints of wilderness and corrosive industry, of transience and endurance.` 35 min. |