By Genna Cherichello

Peter Hutton, an avant-garde filmmaker and professor at Bard College, came to Haverford last Monday to show some of his film and discuss his style. After an introduction from his friend and colleague Assistant Professor of Anthropology Jesse Shipley, Hutton walked to the front of the extremely full Chase Auditorium, coughed, and said, “One thing Jesse forgot to mention was that I’m a dinosaur.”

Hutton is not at all an extinct reptile. His hair is for too awesome for that characterization. However, much of what he values in film has gone unappreciated as filmmaking evolved. He hates the DVD medium, feeling that a lot of the film’s quality gets lost in the transfer. Hutton projected his films himself from a 16 mm projector that many didn’t even know Haverford had.

Inspired by the Hudson River School and painters like J.M.W. Turner, Hutton creates landscape film, bringing his audience into a filmic experience employing only their sense of sight. The visual seems to hold Hutton captive, not leaving him alone until he gives a lot of attention to every scene on which he sets his camera lens. He said that he is essentially recreating the photo album his father created as a merchant marine.

Hutton’s style is the antithesis of what many filmmakers do today, especially Hollywood directors. Instead of condensing as much action and time passage as possible into a feature-length film, films by Hutton’s films exhibit long shots (some uncomfortably long), no sound at all, no camera or editing effects and very little action. The only action comes from within the often still frames. The shots are separated by several seconds of black screen, which Hutton equates to the time it takes to turn the page of his father’s travel photo album.

Hutton plays with the familiar. In the black and white studies screened in Chase on Monday, he played with light in a way that abstracted some things beyond recognition. Even the initially familiar would feel abstract or transformational as the shots remained on screen: the familiar would eventually lose its familiarity and the viewer would begin to see something else within the scene.

Lodz Symphony was an exhibition of a city that is now a ghost of what it was. Lodz, Poland was a manufacturing powerhouse in the nineteenth-century, but as times changed and the Cold War swept through Eastern Europe, the city felt the effects of an economy on the downward swing. Symphony was a chorus of recurring images: statues carrying a lot of weight, chimney sweeps at work, and the textile loom’s output counter (that Hutton revealed was broken and inaccurate).

Study of a River showed the Hudson River in winter, and its interaction with passing ships. Here, Hutton took something completely familiar to most people and it’s exposed the beauty and confusion within it. The only camera “effect” in all four films screened on Monday was in Study; Hutton turned a shot with some reflection upside down, switching reflected scene and reflection.

Like Lodz Symphony, Hutton made filmed “portraits” of New York City. He showed Chapter One and Chapter Two of his New York Portrait series. Images from these ranged from shots of people sleeping in the street (the first of which was seen as just a man sleeping in the street but following by a group of homeless people) to a series of shots following a Goodyear blimp around the city’s sky. Hutton is more like a curious child in New York Portrait: Chapter I and Chapter II than in other films.

The final film shown was Landscape (For Manon). It exhibited many of Hutton’s ideals, especially in the final shot. Manon, his daughter, was sleeping with light glittering her face like sequins, except it took a moment to see it because the camera was zoomed in so much. First, the viewer saw the interactions between light and dark followed by the image coming through the abstraction.

The next afternoon, Hutton visited the Introduction to Film class in the Meditation Room of Woodside Cottage. He showed his latest film, At Sea, which was intended for the Monday screening. The longest and only color work Hutton showed on his visit, At Sea showed the evolution of his work into something a bit different. He features the process of shipbuilding and ship breaking which bookmark a voyage across the Atlantic. Instead of focusing entirely on the effects of light, Hutton used color and a grand scale to inspire visual intrigue.

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