Mon Oct 14 at the Little Theatre, program 1 at 7 pm, program 2 at 9 pm. Peter Hutton's FIlms have gained considerable underground following among the kind of cineaste who still takes particular pleasure in the fact that images move at all. Each film is a slow, meditative series of vignettes in black and white, utterly silent, fading in and out in a way that recalls the deliberate but impenetrable structure of dreams while honoring the roots of the cinematic form.
Hutton's main theme is the landscape--both urban and natural, and their occasional intersection. In New York Portrait: Part III, the city evolves through successive images: clouds inching over skyscrapers; a helicopter sailing across the gap between two silhouetted buildings (you instinctively brace yourself for impact); the spray from a fireboat in New York Harbor. There's a self-conscious nostalgia at work here that must attract fans of the Lumière brothers. Study of a River is more abstract but also more lovely: a stream of elegant images of the near-frozen Hudson River, taken from a boat plowing through the shards of ice. River, more than Portrait, takes you to an odd place, where at times you're not really sure what you're seeing; a complicated assemblage of shapes turns out to be water seen through rigging, or the boat's own prow.
Hutton's films have everything to do with what they leave out: plot, characters, sound, flash. They are almost not film, in the way the term is most commonly understood, at all. What they are is more akin to visual art. In installations that use new media (most commonly video; Hutton works in 16 mm), at least part of the point is to inquire into the act of looking, into what we expect from moving images, usually by patently not providing what's expected--nothing linear, nothing developing, no plot, no character. It becomes the responsibility of the viewer to sit still long enough for meaning to emerge, since meaning isn't going to jump off the screen and put you in a headlock until you give in. But because this isn't a museum installation, you're not moving freely, not coming and going, engaging and re-engaging, but held in your seat until you (perhaps unwillingly) enter a dreamlike state. Which is perhaps something some art installations ought to consider.
