White Light Cinema and The Nightingale Present

Swimming in the Valley of the Moon: Works by Peter Hutton

Sunday, November 20 – 7:00pm
At The Nightingale Cinema (1084 N. Milwaukee Ave.)

White Light Cinema and The Nightingale present a special program remembering the late filmmaker Peter Hutton.

Co-programmer Jesse Malmed writes:

“This year, the experimental film world lost one of its keenest eyes.

Peter Hutton was an elegant ruffian, a casual radical, insistent on looking deeply, on seeing as seeking, on stilling oneself and attuning one’s sense of time to match the place. The films tonight, like most of his oeuvre, are presented in silence.

Hutton’s films find their place in the trajectory of landscape art. The twin artistic influences that dominated Hutton’s early creative life were East Asian aesthetic philosophies and his experience as a merchant marine. He remarked often that this trained him to see. It was a skill that he continued to hone over four and a half decades. He worked slowly: shooting and exploring, watching and re-watching, maintaining and honing a clarity of vision as patient as it was explorative. His films are transportive—not simply to the times and places of their making, but for our senses of seeing. This work is gorgeous—it can make celluloid fetishists of the most hardened viewer—and leaves the viewer in a state of grace, unencumbered by trying to explain its virtues. In addition to the internal composition and tonality of his images, his film are guided by his dedication to revealing stillness in motion and motion in stillness, a devotion to the poethics of sequence and a trust in both his subjects: those opposite his lens and those before the screen. We are made more patient through his films.

Tonight’s screening features a very early work, made in graduate school, which diaristically traces his life at the time and his Bay Area countercultural milieu; one of the many excellent films he made of the eponymous river over the thirty-plus years he lived in the Hudson River Valley, teaching at Bard; and a city symphony for Łódź in the midst of a transformation. We hope you can join us for this too-rare opportunity to honor the life and work of Peter Hutton.” (Jesse Malmed)

PROGRAM:

July ’71 in San Francisco, Living at Beach Street, Working at Canyon Cinema, Swimming in the Valley of the Moon
(1971, 35 minutes, 16mm)

Study of A River
(1997, 16 minutes, 16mm)

Łódź Symphony
(1991–93, 20 minutes, 16mm)

Programmed by Patrick Friel (White Light Cinema) and Jesse Malmed (The Nightingale)

Admission: $7.00-10.00 suggested.

Official Website

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Tags: Chicago, Peter Hutton, The Nightingale, West Town, WLC - Swimming in the Valley of the Moon, Works by Peter Hutton