Film Screenings with filmmaker Peter Hutton

Join us at the Tang for a rare screening of three films by experimental filmmaker Peter Hutton and a Q & A with the artist on Thursday, November 19.

Peter Hutton (born 1944 in Detroit, Michigan) is known primarily for his silent cinematic portraits of cities and landscapes around the world. He has worked as a professional cinematographer, most notably with his former student, documentary director and producer Ken Burns. Hutton studied painting, sculpture and film at the San Francisco Art Institute. He has taught filmmaking at Hampshire College, Harvard University, SUNY Purchase, and Bard College, where he has served as the director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program since 1989. 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.


Tuesday, November 10, 7PM CANCELLED
Study of a River (16 min.)
Time and Tide (35 min.)


Thursday, November 12, 7PM
Two Rivers (45 min.)

Tuesday, November 17, 7PM
Two Rivers (45 min.)

Thursday, November 19, 7PM
Study of a River (16 min.)
Time and Tide (35 min.)
Q & A with Peter Hutton after the screening

Study of a River. 1994–96. A winter’s passage of ships up and down the Hudson, first
viewed from the water and then from an iron-girder railroad bridge that spans the river in
Poughkeepsie. 16 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, brooding fog and sea smoke, and counterpoints of wilderness and
corrosive industry, transience and endurance. 35 min.

Two Rivers. 2001–02. 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 and through monocular portholes and hawsepipes before his panorama opens
onto the quietude of the wooded palisades farther north. He then explores the Three
Gorges area of the Yangtze River as it unfolds like a Chinese scroll painting, bearing
witness to a spectral, sulfurous landscape of factory villages that have since been flooded
by China’s monumental hydroelectric dam project. 45 min.