Organized with support of Trust of Mutual Understanding, in collaboration with FAMU by Henry Hills
Program
with early 16mm films ("July '71 in San Francisco, Living at Beach Street, Working at Canyon Cinema, Swimming in the Valley of the Moon", "New York Near Sleep (for Saskia)", and "Lodz Symphony")
Peter Hutton (b. 1944, Detroit) 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. This comprehensive retrospective of eighteen films reveals an artist dedicated to reawakening a more contemplative and spontaneous way of observing and envisioning the world.
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. "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."
At Sea (2007)
Looking at the Sea (2001)
Time and Tide (2000)
Study of a River (1994-1999)
Lodz Symphony (1992-1993)
New York Portrait (1990-1991)
Landscape: Part II (In Titan's Goblet) (1986-1987)
At Sea, in Berlin, Lenin Portrait (1981-1983)
New York Portrait, Part II (1979-1980)
New York Portrait, Part I (1976-1977)
Images of Asian Music (1973-1974)
Accomplishments
Professor of Film, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, since 1985; Chairman, Film Department, 1994
Retrospectives: George Eastman House, 2001; Museum of Contemporary Art Oslo, Norway, 1998; and Film Podium, Zurich, Switzerland, 1996
Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1990 and 1995
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 1989
Best Cinematography, Sundance Film Festival, 1986
Education
1971 MFA and BFA, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco
