Perched on the bow of a freighter, 18-year-old Peter Hutton peered into the dark skies over the Gulf of Siam. Looking out for storms on night watch, the merchant seaman schooled his eye in the drama of light. Thirty years later the filmmaker says, “It was a huge influence to really pay attention to the weather. Thrust into nature like that, you become really very reverent. There’s an innate respect for the forces of nature, since you’re much more vulnerable to weather on a ship than you are on land.”
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His New York and Budapest portraits evoke the urbane agendas of photographers Alfred Stieglitz and Eugene Atget. His most recent film, In Titan’s Goblet, forsakes the metropolis for the Hudson River Valley, home of a school of landscape painting that inspired him.
It isn’t easy to find a 19th-century landscape in the 20th century. In In Titan’s Goblet an elegant vista is revealed to be a smoldering dump. Then a bulldozer in the background is swallowed up by billowing white clouds. One scene in New York Portrait opens on a smokestack at dusk spilling its inky emissions into the sky. Hutton likes to let swirls and streams of clouds, fog, smoke, and steam paint the screen. He finds his brushes for his grainy canvas in storms and traffic.
The animated grays in Hutton’s films are far from the ghastly tones that startled Gorky. Hutton is a romantic exulting in purified light, not a nihilist eviscerating the visible world. After a lifetime of noisy TVs and overpowering Dolby, today’s audiences can rediscover Clair’s “delightful numbness,” transfixed in the dark, undistracted by auditory illusions.
