collecting images: peter hutton & mark lapore

In 1985, Hutton started teaching film production at Bard College. During the time, he was inspired by the Hudson River School painters and their 19th Century locations. Landscape (For Manon) and In Titan’s Goblet were filmed in this period as a homage to this tradition, the latter is a reference to the eponymous painting by Thomas Cole from 1833. The films exemplify the sensual luminescence of the natural region, its quietude and gentle tonal qualities. For nearly three decades, after shooting on several black and white reversal stocks, Hutton started using color and black and white negative in Time and Tide. The film, shot on the Hudson river between Bayonne, New Jersey and Albany, New York, provides an aquatic perspective of the adjacent landscape. Looking at the Sea was shot on the west coast of Ireland, many of the shots from atop several cliffs. In color and black and white, it is a study of different tones of natural light, the rhythms of the breaking waves, and the absence and presence of horizon lines.

( Arindam Sen, Daniel A. Swarthnas )

Curated and introduced by Arindam Sen and Daniel Swarthnas. Many thanks to Canyon Cinema for providing the analogue prints of this program. Images courtesy of the artist and Canyon Cinema Foundation

Florence is a slow study of light and shadows, textures and planes. As in many of Hutton's films, there is throughout the film, an obscuring and revealing of the sky through the movement of clouds, reflections and mists, and attention to the behavior of light as it passes through openings or grazes over objects. In the New York Portrait trilogy, the city is captured in quiet black-and-white tableaux. By letting his camera rest both on the city’s skyline and the streets, details and the changing urban landscape, Hutton makes visible the social and economic disparities related to power hierarchies. Hutton, through his chiseled vision, is able to successfully tap into the visual rhythms of the city, sometimes even defamiliarizing us from one of the most photographed cities in the world, and simultaneously, comment upon the stark contrasts of its several realities. In Łódź Symphony, the images are concrete and direct. Here, everyday street life in the Polish city of Łódź is portrayed, not as a symphony in the classical sense with rhythmic editing accompanied by music, but with long static shots and silent images that unfold in three movements like a symphony. By depicting rooms, bodies, and faces in a post-communist Poland, Hutton captures a society in transition, marked by both historical traumas and new social divides; worn-out buildings, factory ruins, and portraits of marginalized people further attesting to it.

( Arindam Sen, Daniel A. Swarthnas )

Curated and introduced by Arindam Sen and Daniel Swarthnas. Many thanks to Canyon Cinema for providing the analogue prints of this program. Images courtesy of the artist and Canyon Cinema Foundation.

In these three films, LaPore grapples with the ethical, moral, and political parameters of ethnography, both as epistemology and something deeply rooted in projects of colonialism. Rather than being invasional, LaPore practices observation, neither with cold objectivity nor through an uncritical eye in the pursuit of the exotic, but with a search for an appropriate distance, constantly negotiating his place in the distant lands of North Africa and South Asia. The Sleepers – the last film of his Sudan trilogy – is a rumination on the making and unmaking of cultural stereotypes, the contradictions and overlaps in time and space. A Depression in the Bay of Bengal is a condensed portrait of the island nation of Sri Lanka, and the experience of an outsider–the filmmaker himself–in the tense climate of a raging civil war where the news of violence is just a radio station away. The Five Bad Elements is, in LaPore’s own words, “a filmic Pandora's Box full of my version of "trouble" (death, loss, cultural imperialism).”

( Arindam Sen, Daniel A. Swarthnas )

Curated and introduced by Arindam Sen and Daniel Swarthnas. Many thanks to Canyon Cinema for providing the analogue prints of this program. Images courtesy of the artist and Canyon Cinema Foundation.

Two Rivers is a dual portrait of the Hudson and Yangtze rivers in tinted blue and sepia color. The Hudson was contaminated by General Electric over the decades, while the damming of the Yangtze met with resistance from environmentalists. Hutton takes the extant travelogues of Henry Hudson and Robert Juet (Hudson’s pilot), and his interest in the Hudson river as a departure point for the film, extending it to China, imagining the continuation of Henry’s search for a northern trade route to the country.
In Skagafjördur, shot in Iceland, mountains and seascapes are caressed by plumes of steam and tinges of dramatic sunlight breaking through the clouds. The images are overwhelming and postcard-like, but Hutton balances this bland expression of beauty through his characteristic articulation to the tensions between stasis and motion within the frame and careful control of the color palettes.

( Arindam Sen, Daniel A. Swarthnas )

Curated and introduced by Arindam Sen and Daniel Swarthnas. Many thanks to Canyon Cinema for providing the analogue prints of this program. Images courtesy of the artist and Canyon Cinema Foundation.

The Glass System was filmed in Kolkata, India, and partly in New York’s Chinatown. Shots of mannequins, a portrait of two schoolgirls, a young girl walking on a tightrope, a mechanically operated sugarcane juicer, and a knife sharpening cycle-driven lathe are some of the street scenes that populate the film. The sound increases the density of the impression of the images; a sudden cut to New York functions both as an elegy to a lost time and to an imaginary place. Kolkata was entirely shot in northern and central parts of the eastern metropolitan city. The sound here is shrill – prayers, devotional songs, loudspeakers, and ambient noise are all in there. Mannequins, portraits, markets, and tightropes reappear, it’s the rainy season and there are puddles on the street. But business goes on as usual, and Kolkata concerns itself with the workings of the lowercase capital in the global economy. LaPore’s gaze is always curious and wandering, his frames fragment the filmed bodies. Half of the footage is filmed from an empty cycle van, framing people’s midriffs. The sound in Kolkata is credited to Jonathan Schwartz (1973-2018), a young filmmaker at the time who traveled with LaPore and made his first film, Den of Tigers. Shot at the same locations and simultaneously as LaPore's Kolkata, this film offers an exploration of quotidian life in West Bengal, India. With a profoundly observant gaze, the film captures moments such as people crossing puddled streets with garments lifted ankle-high, an elderly woman pumping water from a tube well, and the hypnotic swing of a young tight-rope walker’s hips, her posture echoing the tautness of the rope beneath her feet.

( Arindam Sen, Daniel A. Swarthnas )

Curated and introduced by Arindam Sen and Daniel Swarthnas. Many thanks to Canyon Cinema for providing the analogue prints of this program. Images courtesy of the artists and Canyon Cinema Foundation.