Audio transcription

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

John Quackenbush  0:00  

November 10, 2016, the Harvard Film Archive screened films by Peter Hutton. This is the introduction by HFA Director Haden Guest and AFVS Professor Alfred Guzzetti.

Haden Guest  0:13  

[INITIAL AUDIO MISSING] ...the Harvard Film Archive, I want to welcome you all to what is for us a very, very special evening. It's an evening in which we are paying tribute to an artist who is very near and dear to the heart of the Harvard Film Archive and to the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, which is where film production is taught here at Harvard, and whose historic and spiritual home is here at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. I'm speaking of Peter Hutton, who was a visionary filmmaker and friend and mentor to many here tonight. We're going to be seeing a group of films from the 1970s of the late Peter Hutton. And we're also going to be seeing a wonderful early interview done with Robert Gardner, the founder of the Harvard Film Archive and longtime teacher here at Harvard, great filmmaker and dear friend to Peter Hutton.

I want to ask everybody, please turn off any cell phones, any electronic devices that you have, and please do not use them during the course of this screening. We've gathered a group of beautiful prints. Really the only way to see Peter Hutton's work is on film. He was a master of the photochemical. And so I'm really happy that we can—though sad—I'm happy that we can see these films as he wanted us to see and appreciate them. This is one of three nights dedicated to Peter Hutton’s works. Tomorrow night we'll be seeing At Sea, which is arguably his magnum opus. And then there's also a Sunday matinee where we'll be seeing another group of films which will be introduced by Fern Silva.

Tonight, though we have with us, a close friend of Peter Hutton’s, and one of my dear colleagues here at Harvard. This is Alfred Guzzetti, who is a senior professor of film in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies. And he is here to say a few words to introduce tonight's screening. So please join me in welcoming Alfred Guzzetti.

[APPLAUSE]

Alfred Guzzetti  2:45  

Thanks, Haden. This morning, when I went out for a walk, I was thinking about Peter. He was a friend. He was not a close friend, but I knew him over many years. And I was thinking of his abrupt death in June. And in this crazy way that my addled brain has been working in the last forty-eight hours, I thought, Well, at least Peter didn't have to live through this catastrophe in our lives. And that reminded me of my friend and collaborator, Dick Rogers, who also died of cancer, in July of 2001—and Dick lived in Manhattan, as Peter did for time—just months before the World Trade Center was bombed.

And those irrelevant associations led me to remember that Dick sold one of his camera, an Arriflex S—a camera that all three of us adored—to Peter, and sometimes when I see his films, I remember that and particularly in the middle of New York Portrait I, there's this exquisite long take of flocking birds, and I think that must be Dick’s camera. So I see this,through all these perspectives of God-knows-what...

Peter was a world traveler. Before he was a filmmaker, he was a merchant marine, and this was very important to him. And his films were made in a lot of different places all over the world. You know, what kind of category does Peter's work belong to? How do I even get my mind around it? One thing is that I think a lot of you know already that in its original use, shortly after the invention of cinema, the French use the word documentaire to describe a travel film. They were films that people brought back from their travels and showed people at home to see the movement and there was life in such places. And, the word documentary isn't coined in English until decades later than that, but it has that root. And Peter was that kind of traveler and even when he was making films that caused him to travel not far from his front door, or even into the other room, they have the sensibility of travel, of seeing things that one is not seeing and seeing them afresh. And it always reminded me of that line that somewhere in Walden, where Thoreau says—he's talking about traveling the world and he says inside his ironic way, “I have traveled much in Concord.” And I think of Peter as like that. I think Peter’s traveled much in Concord, besides going to Poland and Hungary and Bangladesh, where all the films were made.

I think of him also, in this way, as his perspective as a filmmaker, as an outsider looking in at things. Even though as a person, he was friendly, open, approachable, and unpretentious without making egotistic claims for his work. And as an artist, he certainly didn't belong exactly to the documentary world, or to the film world, or to the art world, or [didn’t] even quite fit into the American avant garde. But he was definitely as an artist in a class by himself. He was sui generis; there was nobody like Peter. I mean, everybody that I know, I've talked to about this, has the same sense that there's this immense originality that's incredibly persuasive, and yet, it's outside of all these ways we have of thinking about film.

Place is very important. I went past this before, you know. Think of all the names of the films Florence, Boston Fire, [Swimming in] the Valley of the Moon, Lodz [Symphony], the one in Hungary—I can't remember the name of it—and then finally, At Sea, which I agree with Haden, was his masterpiece, probably where he returned to his origin as a traveler, merchant seaman.

So what can I say? I've been struggling with this, what can I say about his films? I've seen so many of them so many times. And I've thought about them so much. And yet, I'm sort of dumb about them. It's hard to get your mind around them. I want to say though, first of all, that for me, there's certain films that always renew my faith in the possibility of film as a medium. I come to doubt film. At times, I come to hate song. And sometimes I hate it. Sometimes I'm bored to death by its predictable, conventional forms. And then in those moments, when you see a film that's really powerful—even if you've seen a lot of times before—and it's completely original, it seems to reinvent the cinema, and the cinema comes to life. And his films have always had that effect on me. Even though I've seen this so many times, I really do not get tired of them. And I see more in them each time, and each time I come away energized, thinking film can really do something, especially do something with so little means. I mean, he’s so spare. I'll talk about that in a minute.

How to describe them? I realized that my first temptation in describing them is to list a bunch of negatives. By absences. They don't have any sound. They're all silent. They have no color until very late in his career when he took up color. A black and white image, of course, has no color, but it has no shadow detail in it. It has no highlight detail. It's very often a very high-contrast image that lives in the middle of a brightness range. It's very photographic, but it's not like the photography of Ansel Adams where you have this enormous brightness range. It's very confined. It's as if a composer is going to compose something in a hole lies inside one octave, or an octave and a half. But inside that, you can travel much inside that, you know, inside that Concord if you're really gifted. There's practically no montage to speak of, and I'll come back to that. There's no hand-holding. It's nearly always on the tripod. And although the early film I recall, the camera does move some. And in many of the shots, there's almost no motion, so it's a kind of paradox exactly—which I’ll also come back to: why is this like cinema. And it's not translatable into other media. It's film which is really bound to the idea of film. And in this way, it's like painting, I think, which doesn't translate. It's the thing itself. You see the object. Even though it's in the age of mechanical reproduction, yes, and you can make prints of it, but in its conception of what it is—and I'll try to say more about this in a minute—it is like a painting in the sense that Stanley Cavell talks about paintings and films: in the painting, it doesn't make sense to ask what's outside the painting. And I want to come back to talk about Peter in the frame in a second, in the same way. And I think that it reflects his background in his study of painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, some of which is referenced in the first of the films, not the first that we'll see, but the first one. This is actually the second one he made, I think.

So what is it about the films that makes him so amazing and extraordinary? I realized I couldn't just get up here and say how amazing they are, but I find that to be truthful. I feel like I've thought about film and I've worked about work in film all of my life, and I've started to realize that I really don't understand film, it's very hard to understand how it works. And the more I know, the less I understand about it. And I particularly struggle with the idea of what one can say in film. What one can say in words can be relevant to what happens in a film. It's the same kind of struggle that there is in music, there's a limitation to what you can say in words [that] will tell you anything very deep about film. I mean, I can say that there's a long film called At Sea that’s shot in a boat, but it's really very superficial and doesn't say much about how that works, or why that works.

I can start here though; here's something I'm very sure of. Peter’s cinema is a cinema of the shot, the individual shot. And it lives up on the screen, in a way, in glorious isolation, both from the other shots and in the sense that it has been torn from the world. Yes, it's a photographic image. Yes, it refers to the world. New York Portrait was the Empire State Building. I recognize the Empire State Building, okay. But all of the stylistic, all the aesthetic inside the film and inside the shot, is to detach it somewhat while making it no less photographic. And I think that's one of the springs of power of Peter's work as an artist. I think that's a source. It's a photographic image. It’s a particular photographic image. It's something that he cultivated through a whole lifetime, where, as far as I'm aware, he worked constantly with one film stock—and some people in the room know this film stock very well—namely, Tri-X reversal. So he got to learn to play that in a way that a violinist plays the violin; he knew exactly what it would do, and he knows a couple of things too, that if you underexposed it a little bit, it accentuates the grain, and then the grain becomes a player in the construction of the image. I mean, this isn't mentioned much but pay attention to this when you look at the films. Peter is a master of the interaction between grain and time, and also the image that the grain forms. Peter tells the story that early on—maybe it's after the Valley of the Moon film. I can never remember whether it's before or after—that he threw away his light meter. And to those of us who know Tri-X film in the way that we do, this is crazy! He threw away his light meter? This is an extremely unforgiving medium, Tri-X reversal. If you don't hit the exposure on the nose, you know, it's strike three. But I mention it because I think it's very telling, because as you'll see, he's not after hitting the exposure on the nose. What he's after is a kind of expressive detachment of the image from its spatial surround. I always attributed this to his background in painting: he is meticulous about—and original and insightful about—the composition of the frame. So as things lie in the frame, that is a vision, it's something that he’s seen and put together that makes sense in a way that a photograph makes sense and in the way that a painting makes sense. So although the image doesn't evoke the space, it transposes the space into this flat organization, and then Peter takes the opportunity to really do the flat organization by attending to the composition of the elements. Composition really in the root sense of the word, to put together: to posit, and then the com is, you know, to assemble the thing. And every single one is like that. He also—in a number of his films—will not cut one shot directly into the text, but cut each shot into a piece of black leader or fades it out before the next one comes in. So it emphasizes the separability of the shot in which the shot is I would say a monad floating in space. And then by the time he gets real control of that, he sometimes can afford to cut one shot to the other without making me feel that they are really living together exactly, but they are detached.

And I think it's for this reason that he never was tempted by sound. Of course, I guess a lot of us know, he worked as a commercial cinematographer sometimes. He was very stunning at that. The work that he did doesn't look like his personal work. So he knew how to do that. So the refusal of sound is a real refusal, and I think the reason is that the photographic image lives up there—the film image especially—lives up there on the screen in a rectangle. So there's one from New York Portrait. It lives up there in a rectangle. And sound doesn't live up there inside confined into a rectangle. Sound lives in a space that goes all around us, that violates, that doesn't have boundaries. So if you put any sound with this, especially the documentary sound of where it came from, it would evoke a spatial presumption about what comes next and it would tether the shot more to the reality it came from, and the aesthetic is exactly the opposite of that. So that's why I think the shots don't have sound, and I think that that sound is unimaginable for Peter's work, and if it was imaginable for him.

There's one other thing. There's very little movement inside most of the shots in the frame, but sometimes there is movement. And I'm gonna come back to what I said before: one of the movements is sometimes grain which he sometimes aggravates by deliberate underexposure and putting significant amounts of midtone and and we all know the grain loves midtone. And so when you get is a kind of dancing texture on the screen, and one could say, seeing the films for the first time, these don't seem to be film shots, it seems like a slideshow. So it has a kinship to a photographic slideshow. Yes, I don't mean to deny that. But the shots have duration, and we are reminded of the duration—I am at least—by the dancing grain which sets a very fast counter rhythm to the extremely slow rhythm of the cutting, and sort of measures it out. So the time does come into play. Yes, he is primarily a filmmaker of space. But time is into the equation too. So there's no question the film stock he got married to gives him that. Because, there were choices in the world. You didn't have to have that one.

Now, how do the shots go together? There's very little montage. I don't mean that in the restrictive sense of the Soviets in the 1920s, that idea of montage. I mean, in general, the assemblage of shots the way that the French use the word montage. In the credits, it names the person who edited the film, the montage is by the editor, that means editing, montage. So a movie has to be edited because there has to be one thing that comes after another, and he knows that and I don't mean to deny that, but the power of the montage is severely curtailed partly by isolating the shots in black, saying “regard this one alone, more than its relationship to the other shots,” and then, having established that style in many of the films, he then will allow himself actually to cut one shot into the next, sometimes when there are comparisons of form or comparisons of composition. But that's not the zero degree of his style. He can afford that because he isolates so stringently.

He told this story over and over again. And I think the story became kind of a fixed story, but it's a revealing story. He said, People ask him all the time, “Why the black?” and “Why are the shots so still?” And he would say that his father was a world traveler too and I think, maybe a seaman. And he took photographs, brought them back home and put them in photographic albums. One picture on a page of black, you've seen that kind of old photographic album where the pages are black, and the snapshots are pasted on them. So Peter's experience of seeing the world as a child, he adored these albums that his father made and would turn the pages over and over and see one shot in relation to the next. And his phrase was, “and so I never bought into montage.” And I think that's right, he never did buy into montage. And then it sort of makes me think, everybody else bought into montage. And then this is one of the wonderful things about seeing the world freshly as he does is that he doesn't buy into the most fundamental things. I mean, Eisenstein said montage was cinema. And that's a lot. But we all believe that montage is very powerful, but Peter’s not sure. So why does one shot follow another when you watch the films? This is something of a puzzle. It's clear why they to me why they begin. It's clear how they end, where it goes from and goes to. There's an arc. And if you look at like New York Portrait, it's even clear that there's middle marking, which is that marvelous shot that I refer to, it's a very long take. And it's clear that that's a kind of fulcrum. But for as many times as I've seen many of these films, I couldn't really give you much of an analysis about why this one follows that one, although you'll see—and we'll all see—that there are clusters of shots that sometimes—as in a piece of music—there's a phrase followed by an echoing phrase, followed by an echoing developmental phrase, and so on. But it is a kind of pointillistic dissociative music in the same way that I was reading the other day that the Darmstadt composers in Germany, who gathered in Germany—like Stockhausen and Boulez—aimed for a kind of music that was dissociated phrases, and one of the ideals that they pointed to was Jeux by Debussy. So something connected between that and the refusal of montage in the cinema and the way that Peter refuses and defines a progression that is mysterious as that and as mysterious as Debussy was after and as mysterious as the Darmstadt composers to think about.

Just a couple of other things. This leads me to think, once a film scholar friend of mine said “Alfred, the trouble with your films is that you're a modernist among postmodernists.” Well, I don't know if I am or not, but I'm glad to be called a modernist. I would turn that around and say the same thing about Peter’s films. I think he was a modernist among the postmodernists in a couple of senses. One was that the work was so medium specific, and it seems funny to say that about something as ephemeral and diaphanous as a projected film image, but I think he was a modernist. And the other aspect of of the modernism is think there is very little irony in Peter’s films, in a way that there's an irony in the idea of postmodernism, and I would add to that, if you think of him, let's say, in comparison to the other great master of the silent avant garde, Stan Brakhage, you look at the claims that even the titles make of Stan Brakhage’s films—Dog Star Man, The Art of Vision, The Text of Light, Scenes from Under Childhood, The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes—those are grand messianic claims and they’re metaphoric claims. I would say that there's nothing whatever metaphoric about Peter’s films,that they live completely without irony and in reference to the literal and they are an art of vision, and I celebrate them for that reason and I'm glad to live in a world that has them.

[APPLAUSE]

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