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Time and Tide: Reflections on Experimental Filmmaker Peter Hutton

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By: Alibastard | in: Movies |

It’s not totally impossible that you have heard of Peter Hutton. The 62 year-old experimental filmmaker has been noticeably “on the map” since he crafted his meditative, black and white New York Portraits throughout the seventies and eighties. No stranger to the Whitney Biennial and within several circles of the film realm both narrative and non, Hutton has devoted the majority of his career towards capturing stunning images of world landscape and culture, working almost exclusively (and with effortless cool) in 16 mm film.

Peter Hutton

Initially a painter with a background rooted in the fine arts, his films often deal with the poetry of landscapes, with the ethereal and hypnotic character of water, and the illusory qualities of scale. 10 years as a merchant seaman refined his vision, and trained his eye in filmmaking better than any academy could have. His last film, Skagafjordur, is a good example, set around the enormous green mountains of Iceland, and proved so captivating that it grabbed the attention of Icelandic ether-rockers Sigur Ros.
More than some National Geographic travelogue, Hutton’s work intellectually becalms, but with a sensitivity to image chronology that builds a kind of broader narrative. It is of course unrestricted to singular characters, sometimes refrains from showing human beings at all, but all of his work owns a deliberate collage that engages the viewer into more than simple sight-seeing. More than anything, Hutton’s outpour of vistas and human forms instill a deep sense of “seeing” in a participatory way. Its like every time you watch one of his films you are given back the ability to see with 100% of your vision, rather than the 50% or so usually squared away for an action scene or some emotional sturm und drang.
Despite their lack of sound and seeming lack of concrete narrative, Hutton’s work is unsuspectingly riveting. It functions like soundless broadcasts from alien worlds, so vivid and so unreal you can’t help but watch them, and arranged in a fashion that alludes to deeper meanings too delicate to bully you into bullshitting, too deliberate to seem half-assed.
In his latest film Falling into the Sea, Hutton travels across the Atlantic on cargo freighters to Bangladesh, Hamburg and South Korea in order to loosely capture a “life of a container ship.” Beginning the film within the bright enormity of South Korea’s industrial ship building plants, Hutton captures colossal yellow cranes and their surreal luggage – gray hulls that look like newly manufactured parts of Imperial space craft. Tiny Korean workers busy around enormous, multicolored structures within this vivid cataloguing of how the largest ships in the world are assembled, painted and then set on water.
Next you travel through ice storms, vivid blue and torrential rain, all the while the piercing colors of compartmentalized containers in front view, dipping in and out of the water like an oversized, Playskool-colored skyscraper set sideways. This is the typical life of a container ship – an escort for accessories ready for American consumption, packed in rectangular rainbow shells.

hutton.jpg

Finally we end at the ship graveyards of the Bangladeshi coastline where strangely smiling, skinny men walk in the toxic muck of skeletal ship-parts, salvaging steel from the rusted-out ruins and, occasionally, interacting with Peter’s camera with charmed fascination.
Despite the decrepitude of these environs, the colors captured are far more complex, the ship’s corroded skins boasting brilliant hues worlds away from the stark, stupid primary colors of the Korean newborns. Strangely, as well, despite the obvious poverty and the lack of structure inherent in these worker’s jobs (as compared to the plant workers on the Korean site) the Bangladeshi men are captured more up-close, a greater humanity resonating beneath them, a greater internal happiness evident.
I met up with Hutton to see the film last week. Sinking into his leather loveseat in Tivoli, New York, he prefaced the work with this quote from Joseph Conrad:

“A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea.”

The film ends with this concept at the bow, back in the territory of Peter’s initial interest: black and white, meditating on the glittering sea itself, independent of man or ship. And when the lights go up, you can’t help but see the world around you in new light and stumble home with a rejuvenated sense of what passes so easily around you as “everyday”.
A stunning retrospective of his work is planned for 2008.


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Posted on April 4, 2007

Comments

One Response to “Time and Tide: Reflections on Experimental Filmmaker Peter Hutton”

  1. Trevor Loomis on July 22nd, 2007 8:59 pm

    Could you please send me Peter Hutton’s email address as I am a filmmaker and would like to talk to him.

    Thank you

    Trevor


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