Peter Hutton

Peter Hutton (1944-2016) was an experimental filmmaker noted for his contemplative, sensuous, and masterfully photographed portraits of landscapes and cities. Hutton, who made his first films in the early 1970s, spent more than four decades bringing motion pictures back to the moment when the Lumière brothers invented the medium in the 1890s. All of his films were silent. Generally devoid of camera movement and montage, they suggest sketchbooks or photographic albums. Many are reveries in which the only animation in a precisely balanced composition might come from a wayward breeze or a slight shift in illumination. Most of his films were voluptuously monochromatic as Hutton himself was mildly colorblind. Beginning with July ’71 in San Francisco, Living at Beach Street, Working at Canyon Cinema, Swimming in the Valley of the Moon (1971), which was shot when he was a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, his films were largely defined by place. Locations included Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, China and Iceland, as well as several American cities. The most elusive and melancholy of city symphonies, his three-part New York Portrait, was shot mainly in the late ’70s and early ’80s but not completed until 1990. Budapest Portrait (Memories of a City) (1984-86) epitomizes Hutton’s austerely romantic worldview. The movie is a half-hour succession of moldering apartment houses and massive factories, a place of faded splendor and industrial funk, populated by lonely Stalinist monuments and revolutionary ghosts. Human presence is minimal and typically suggested at one remove by photographs, shadows or bullet holes. The city might be a stage set for an invisible drama. He had originally wanted to be a painter and studied art in Hawaii. He began making films at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts. He later taught filmmaking at a number of schools, including Bard College, where he was the director of the film and electronic arts program, and worked as a professional cinematographer, largely on documentaries — including Baseball and The Statue of Liberty, directed by Ken Burns, a former student — and independent features. In the mid-1980s, he settled in the Hudson River Valley and took that landscape — the inspiration for one of America’s first major schools of indigenous painters — as his own in films like Landscape (for Manon) (1986-87), a depiction of Kaaterskill Clove; In Titan’s Goblet (1991), a movie taking its title from a painting by Thomas Cole; and Study of a River (1994-96), a contemplation of ships on the Hudson. In 2010, the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress selected Study of a River for permanent preservation. The Museum of Modern Art in New York held an 18-film retrospective of his work in 2008. A 2010 critics’ poll organized by Film Comment magazine ranked Mr. Hutton’s At Sea (2004-7), an hour-long chronicle of a giant container ship from its creation in South Korea to its destruction in Bangladesh, the best avant-garde film of the decade. In the past few years, Mr. Hutton had exhibited his work as gallery installations.