Peter B. Hutton

Peter B. Hutton

Birth : 1944-08-24, Detroit, Michigan, USA

Death : 2016-06-25

History

Peter Hutton (born 1944 in Detroit, Michigan) was an experimental filmmaker, known primarily for his silent cinematic portraits of cities and landscapes around the world. He also worked as a professional cinematographer, most notably for his former student Ken Burns. Hutton studied painting, sculpture and film at the San Francisco Art Institute. He taught filmmaking at CalArts, Hampshire College, Harvard University, SUNY Purchase, and Bard College, where he served as the director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program from 1989 to 2016. Hutton's films are distributed by Canyon Cinema in San Francisco. In May 2008 the Museum of Modern Art in New York held a full retrospective of Hutton's films.

Profile

Peter B. Hutton

Movies

14 STANDARD 8mm REELS 1981–1988
A few years ago, Preiss had the rare chance to salvage a selection of 8mm reels from his archive; 30 years after it was first shot, this lovingly refashioned material returns as both a luminescent ode to the friends, filmmakers, and artists with whom Preiss lived and worked during that time, and a considered meditation on the evolution of diaristic filmmaking. (-MoMA)
The Making of a Superhero Musical
Thanks
A mockumentary following the troubled production of Clockmen: The Musical, focusing on a cosplayer-turned-actress who reacts to the stress of the production in a rather unusual way.
All About Bolex
"I developed a need to try to retain everything I was passing through, by means of my Bolex camera."
Three Landscapes
Director
Shot on 16mm, this wondrous silent film study from avant-garde master Peter Hutton (At Sea) observes human movement across three distinct landscapes: Detroit, along the Hudson River Valley and in the Dallol Depression in Ethiopia.
At Sea
Cinematography
Three segments depicting the life cycle of a freighter boat.
At Sea
Director
Three segments depicting the life cycle of a freighter boat.
Skagafjördur
Director
A film documenting the landscapes of northern Iceland, as well as a recent work about the Hudson River.
Two Rivers
Director
Commissioned by the arts organization Minetta Brook, Two Rivers was inspired by Henry Hudson’s failed 1609 quest to discover a trade route between North America and China. Hutton observes the bustling industry of the Hudson from atop a ship’s deck. "A poetic, comparative portrait of the Hudson River and Yangtze River that speaks to the rise of China in relation to the decline of a post-industrial American region."
Looking at the Sea
Director
This movie is about a filmmaker looking at the sea.
Time and Tide
Editor
Peter Hutton’s meditation on the Hudson River.
Time and Tide
Director of Photography
Peter Hutton’s meditation on the Hudson River.
Time and Tide
Director
Peter Hutton’s meditation on the Hudson River.
Study of a River
Director
The first part (winter) of a seasonal study of the Hudson river in New York.
Łódź Symphony
Director
A portrait of Łódź, Poland that exists in a time-warp of sad memory.
In Titan's Goblet
Director
In Titan's Goblet refers to a landscape painting by Thomas Cole circa 1833. The film is intended as a homage to Cole, who is regarded as the father of the Hudson River School of painting.
New York Portrait
Director
Peter Hutton's New York trilogy. An act of urban archaeology, a chronicle of indelible impressions of the city.
New York Portrait, Chapter III
Director
"[Hutton’s] latest urban film, New York Portrait, Chapter III, takes on a unique tone in relation to Hutton’s ongoing exploration of rural landscape. The very fact that Hutton is dealing with older footage, with archives of memory more than immediacy, gives it a different texture than his earlier New York films. Hutton always found the presence of nature in the city, not only in his many shots of sky and vegetation, but also in the geometry and texture of the city itself, which seemed to project an independence from the human." (Tom Gunning)
Landscape (for Manon)
Director
A languid, beautifully shot collection of landscapes, edited into a whimsical and touching film.
No Picnic
Director of Photography
A cinematic love letter to a pre-gentrification New York City
Emlékek egy városból
Director
Peter Hutton’s essay on the naturalization of the urban landscape. Voluptuously gray, worn and lived in, the city is like a stage set for an invisible drama.
Born in Flames
Additional Camera
In near-future New York, 10 years after the “social-democratic war of liberation,” diverse groups of women organize a feminist uprising as equality remains unfulfilled.
New York Portrait, Chapter II
Director
Chapter Two represents a continuation of daily observations from the environment of Manhattan compiled over a period from 1980-1981. This is the second part of an extended life's portrait of New York.
Boston Fire
Director
BOSTON FIRE finds grandeur in smoke rising eloquently from a city blaze. Billowing puffs of darkness blend with fountains of water streaming in from offscreen to orchestrate a play of primal elements. The beautiful texture of the smoke coupled with the isolation from the source of the fire erases the destructive impact of the event. The camera, lost in the immense dark clouds, produces images for meditation removed from the causes or consequences of the scene. The tiny firemen, seen as distant silhouettes, gaze in awe, helpless before nature’s power.
New York Portrait, Chapter I
Director
Hutton's most impressive work ... the filmmaker's style takes on an assertive edge that marks his maturity. The landscape has a majesty that serves to reflect the meditative interiority of the artist independent of any human presence. ... New York is framed in the dark nights of a lonely winter. The pulse of street life finds no role in NEW YORK PORTRAIT; the dense metropolitan population and imposing urban locale disappear before Hutton's concern for the primal force of a universal presence. With an eye for the ordinary, Hutton can point his camera toward the clouds finding flocks of birds, or turn back to the simple objects around his apartment struggling to elicit a personal intuition from their presence. ... Hutton finds a harmonious, if at times melancholy, rapport with the natural elements that retain their grace in spite of the city's artificial environment. The city becomes a ghost town that the filmmaker transforms into a vehicle reflecting his personal mood.
Florence
Cinematography
Florence is a contemplative study of light and shadows, textures and planes, that makes beautiful use of the tonal qualities of black and white film. (mubi.com)
Florence
Director
Florence is a contemplative study of light and shadows, textures and planes, that makes beautiful use of the tonal qualities of black and white film. (mubi.com)
Images of Asian Music (A Diary from Life 1973-74)
Director
A contemplative, seemingly timeless record of the years Hutton spent in Southeast Asia while working as a merchant seaman. Jon Jost writes, "The film is rich with truly wonderful visions: a thick, white porcelain cup perched on a ship's rail, the tea within swaying gently in sync with the ship while the sea rushes by beyond…the faces of crewmen posing awkwardly but also movingly for the camera; a cockfight on ship; scenes from a bucolic pre–Pol Pot Phnom Penh. Images has the haunting elegiac resonance of Eugène Atget's Paris, the echo of a time and place that was." - MoMA
New York Near Sleep for Saskia
Director
“Using exciting juxtapositions of shade and movement, this silent and surreally poetic film examines subtle changes of light and landscape in New York. NEW YORK NEAR SLEEP exploits the basic potential of film for capturing light refractions. Hutton imposes on this film the aesthetics of still photography and uses as a structural device the duration of perception of the subtle reflection of movements and illuminations.” – Bill Moritz, Theatre Vanguard
July '71 in San Francisco, Living at Beach Street, Working at Canyon Cinema, Swimming in the Valley of the Moon
Director
July ’71 is as much a record of the daily experiences of light and shadow as it is a catalogue of domestic life. More involved with “straight photography” than Brakhage, but far more engaged with tactility and the plastics of the image than Jonas Mekas, this early work embraces the mundane—making bread in the kitchen, riding bikes by the San Francisco Bay, hanging out in a cheap-looking flat with friends, plucking a game fowl for supper—while also paying attention to the wind, water, and trees that surround these fleeting moments.
Riverbody
A continuous dissolve of 87 male and female nudes. "The film's fascination lies with the suspense of that magic moment, halfway between two persons, when the dissolve technique produces composite figures, oftentimes hermaphroditic, that inspires awe for the mystery of the human form." - B. Ruby Rich, Chicago Art Institute
In Marin County
Director
"IN MARIN COUNTY approaches the subject of America's ecological disaster as a comic yet bizarre vision. The tradition of Old MacDonald's farm has long since disappeared and in its place are bulldozer and insect sprays. Our fascination with these mechanized wonders of civilization may well prove to be more lethal than we would have imagined. Peter Hutton has succeeded in making an important statement on ecology and the strange delight Americans take in destroying things." - Whitney Museum of American Art