Hudson River film event scheduled

A still from Peter Hutton's Time and Tide.

As part of its ongoing Lives of the Hudson exhibition, the Tang Museum will present "Investigating the Hudson," a rare opportunity to view selected films by experimental filmmaker Peter Hutton. Hutton's luminous and meditative films of cities, rivers, and landscapes have been hailed by Cahiers du cinéma as "a sort of primitive documentary, which celebrates the beauty of the world without forgetting to observe people, the conditions they live and work under."

 

Taking place over three November nights—Nov. 12, 17, and 19—the screenings will begin at 7 p.m. in the Tang. Hutton will take part in a question-and-answer session following the Nov. 19 showing. Hutton's Study of a River (1994-96) and Time and Tide (1998-2000) will be shown Nov. 10 and 19, and his Two Rivers (2001-02) will be shown Nov. 12 and 17.

The 16-minute Study of a River shows a winter passage of ships up and down the Hudson, viewed from the water and from an iron-girder railroad bridge spanning the river at Poughkeepsie. Time and Tide (35 minutes) opens with pioneering cinematographer Billy Bitzer's 1903 time-lapse travelogue of maritime and manufacturing activity along the Hudson, followed by meditative views of the river's rhythms, fog, sea smoke, and counterpoints of wilderness and industry. Inspired by Henry Hudson's failed 1609 quest to discover a trade route between North America and China, Two Rivers (45 minutes) first features the Hudson, with its bustling industry (filmed from a ship's deck and through portholes and hawse pipes) giving way to a panorama of wooded palisades farther north. The second river, the Yangtze, is filmed in footage that bears witness to a landscape of factory villages that has since been flooded by China's monumental hydroelectric dam project.

Hutton is currently a professor and director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard College. He studied painting, sculpture, and film at the San Francisco Art Institute under the tutelage of Robert Nelson, Bruce Nauman, and Bruce Conner. Hutton has taught filmmaking at Hampshire College, Harvard University, and SUNY Purchase, where his students have included Sadie Benning, Matthew Buckingham, Ken Burns, Hal Hartley, and Mira Nair.

            

A former merchant seaman, Hutton has spent nearly forty years voyaging around the world, creating what has been called "intimately diaristic studies of place." Often traveling by cargo ship, Hutton has filmed locations such as the Polish industrial city of Lódz, the fjord valley and coastline of northern Iceland, New York City, and a ship graveyard on the Bangladeshi shore. His filmic explorations of the Hudson River and its valley are said to transcribe and exalt landscape 
in the manner of Thomas Cole and the 19th-century Luminist painters. Born in Detroit, Mich., in 1944, Hutton lives and works in Annandale-on-Hudson.

           

Hutton is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.  His films have been shown at the Whitney Biennial in New York City, the New York and Rotterdam film festivals, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and REDCAT in Los Angeles, among other venues. In 2008, New York City's Museum of Modern Art held a full retrospective of Hutton's films.           

"Investigating the Hudson" is one of a number of public events complementing Lives of the Hudson, on view through March 14, 2010. For more information, call 518-580-8080.


Tags: peter hutton, investigating the hudson