"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
1970, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $30
"Diary films have become a distinct genre of the independent film movement. Like a written diary, they forego the necessity of plot, character development and other attributes of a well-constructed story and concentrate simply but lovingly on the day-to-day or moment-to-moment events happening to the filmmakers. Peter Hutton's film is, to my mind, one of the best of the genre - for it truly lets us get inside the filmmaker's mind and sensations through, and in conjunction with, his role as filmmaker. It is almost as if we see how carrying around the camera and focusing on different people, things and events actually changes and refines the filmmaker's normal perception of them. The camera becomes an instrument not to record reality but to expand it. And like any diary, it is both an exploration and crystallization of events and impressions in one's life." - David Bienstock
"Very down to earth, very clear, very good feeling. The clarity of the mind, the clarity of the camera, the clarity of thought - it all adds to a very clear film." - Jonas Mekas, The Village Voice
Award: Yale Film Festival, 1972
1971, 16mm, b&w/si, 35m, $105
"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
1972, 16mm, b&w/si, 10m, $30
"IMAGES OF ASIAN MUSIC represents footage compiled during 1973-1974 when Peter Hutton was living in Thailand and working at sea as a merchant seaman. While the film is silent, the title was intended to evoke a comparison to the movement of classical Asian music. IMAGES OF ASIAN MUSIC is a personal celebration of Asia formed by a sensitivity to filmic composition and to the perception of these images in a silent time created by the filmmaker." - Whitney Museum of American Art
"... The camera records a ship working out of Thailand, the faces of the seamen, the sea, a storm, fireworks, a big snake coiling exploratorily about a young girl, the huge Buddha in the lotus position and landscapes and skyscapes reminiscent of the film work of Satyajit Ray. It is beautiful, mute, and meaningful in the silence." - Archer Winston, New York Post
1973-1974, 16mm, b&w/si, 29m, $90
"Like Hutton's previous films, 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. Throughout the film there is a motion of obscuring and revealing in clouds, reflections and mists, and in the behavior of light as it passes through various openings or substances. Frequently, the images are ambiguous details. One feels that Hutton is very at home in the world he sees, and that he looks at things a little more closely than most people ...." - Ken DeRoux, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
1975, 16mm, b&w/si, 7m, $20
"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." -Millennium Film Journal
1979, 16mm, b&w/si, 8m, $25
"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. The last shot looks across a Brooklyn beach toward the skyline of Coney Island's amusement park .� The quiet park evokes the once frantic city smothered by winter. Nature continues its eternal cycles impervious to the presence of man, the aspirations of society, or the decay of the metropolis." - Millennium Film Journal
1978-1979, 16mm, b&w/si, 16m, $50
CHAPTER II 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.
"Hutton's black and white haikus are an exquisite distillation of the cinematic eye. The limitations imposed - no color, no sound, no movement (except from a vehicle not directly propelled by the filmmaker), no direct cuts since the images are born and die in black - ironically entail an ultimate freedom of the imagination. ... If pleasure can disturb, Hutton's ploys emerge in full focus. These materializing then evaporating images don't ignite, but conjure strains of fleeting panoramas of detached bemusement. More than mere photography, Hutton's contained-with-in-the-frame juxtapositions are filmic explorations of the benign and the tragic ...." - Warren Sonbert
1980-1981, 16mm, b&w/si, 16m, $50
"[BUDAPEST PORTRAIT] may be his strongest essay yet on the naturalization of the urban landscape. For Hutton, the city is less a social matrix than a verdant asphalt jungle. Close-up portraits of two ancient rag-pickers and a succession of elderly peasant women aside, virtually every other person shown is dominated by the surroundings. Human presence is often suggested merely by indexical signs - photographs, shadows or bullet holes. This relative absence of the figure, together with the harsh chiaroscuro of the winter light, induces a poignant sense of loneliness and isolation. Voluptuously gray, worn and lived in, the city is like a stage set for an invisible drama." - J. Hoberman, Artforum
1984-1986, 16mm, b&w/si, 30m, $90
First section of an extended study of the weather and landscape in the Hudson River Valley.
1986-1987, 16mm, b&w/si, 18m, $55
"[Hutton's] latest urban film, NEW YORK PORTRAIT 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, in spite of many continuities with them. 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. This film seems to bathe itself in a nostalgia for things human, as if Hutton were looking at a vanishing race. Again humor rather than lamentation prevails, but never has it seemed that people were so contingent in Hutton's films. The high angle of observation, frequent in Hutton's previous New York films (and an invocation of their diaristic observer quality), here seems to carry a sense of withdrawal, a distance matched by compassion. ... The final image in which a small shape against the scale of skyscraper and sky suddenly reveals itself as human by its motion seems emblematic, as does Hutton's observations of the accidents and rescue of people below on the street." - Tom Gunning
1990, 16mm, b&w/si, 15m, $45
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.
1991, 16mm, b&w/si, 10m, $30
A portrait of Lodz, Poland that exists in a timewarp of sad memory. Hutton creates an empty world evoking the 19th century industrial atmosphere that is populated with the ghosts of Poland's tragic past.
1991-1993, 16mm, b&w/si, 20m, $60
The first part of a seasonal portrait of the Hudson River. This section portrays observations of winter over a period of two years.
1996-1997, 16mm, b&w/si, 16m, $50
The first section of the film is a reprint of a reel shot by Billy Bitzer in 1903 titled "Down the Hudson" for Biograph. It chronicles in single frame time lapse a section of the river between Newburgh, NY and Yonkers. The second section of the film was shot by filmmaker Peter Hutton (1998-99) and records fragments of several trips up and down the Hudson River between Bayonne, New Jersey and Albany, New York. The filmmaker was traveling on the tugboat "Gotham" as it pushed (up river) and pulled (down river) the Noel Cutler, a barge filled with 35,000 barrels of unleaded gasoline. "In recent years filmmakers as diverse as Abbas Kiarostami, Claire Denis and Stan Brakhage have offered extraordinary films in which landscape and seascape were paramount. It is fitting then, that Hutton, one of the greatest visual poets of the portraiture of place, has just completed his first film in many years - a meditation on the Hudson River. Combining the luminescence and formal contemplation of the Hudson Valley painters with documentary and ecological concerns, Time and Tide extends the panoramic field of Hutton's previous Portrait of a River. And after decades of an exclusive devotion to and mastery of reversal black and white stocks, Time and Tide marks Hutton's inaugural foray into color negative." - Mark McElhatten
2000, 16mm, color/si, 35m, $120
2001, 16mm b&w/si, 20m, $75
A film documenting the landscapes of northen Iceland, as well as a recent work about the Hudson River. Drawing on the traditions of 19th-century landscape painting and still photography, Hutton's contemplative, meticulously composed films unfold as a series of tableaux seperated by black leader. They have been shown at museums and festivals around the world, most recently at the 2004 editions of the Whitney Biennial and the Toronto International Film Festival.
2004, 16mm, b&w/si, 33m, $100