“Cinema has become such a commodified form of information and entertainment that it’s morphed into something that disengages the viewer from their visual discipline and the fact that you can find pleasure in just looking at something. I’m doing something that’s perhaps in opposition to the whole tradition of cinema, which is about condensing our experiences.”
The sublime portraits of Peter Hutton’s cities and landscapes display the work of a filmmaker dedicated to the Lumiere brothers’ celebration of the single-image shot. For forty years,Hutton, a former merchant seaman, has travelled the world from the Yangtze River to the Hudson River Valley, from the Polish city of Lodz to the shores of Iceland and Bangladesh, filming place and landscape in the spirit of the Lumiere brothers’ first voyageur-cinematographers. “Like the haiku of Bashô,” the scholar Tom Gunning observes, “these seemingly simple films offer lessons in the art of seeing and fashioning images that make you wonder how anyone could produce something simultaneously so humble and so astounding.”
Doc Talk recorded at March 17, 2014
The New School Doc Studies 