Peter Hutton – At Sea

Peter Hutton – At Sea
9th July 2016 19:00 – 21:00
Art Anew gallery, Taichung, Taiwan
Organiser: The Other Cinema Collective & George Clark

“Cinema tends to be this additive thing, it gets more complicated technologically… I wanted to do it alone, keep it personal and private. Almost like making sketchbooks. The more I kept it simple the more I could work… It’s not about the pyrotechnics, it’s about something else—being inventive with limitations.” – Peter Hutton, 2012

Peter Hutton’s film At Sea (2007, 16mm, 60mins) depicts the life cycle of a container ship – from its construction in a Korean shipyard, an epic winter journey across the Atlantic and its final resting place on the shores of Bangladesh where teams of ship breakers manually take apart the vast vessel for recycling. Voted the best avant-garde film of the past decade in a 2011 Film Comment poll, At Sea is a wordless critique of the endless transportation of goods and an elegiac study of the passing of time. American filmmaker Peter Hutton (1944 – 2016) spent nearly 40 years crafting his intimate depictions of the world, he travelled extensively to create his beautifully composed studies of landscapes, cities and the largely unseen territory of the oceans. Subtle critiques of global commerce and the inadequacy of images to depict the enormity and complexity of the world, his films chart the slow passing of the industrial age and the increasing invisibility of labour. Marked by formative experiences as a merchant seaman he supported his art education and early films by working aboard container ships, making films works in South East Asia, the cityscapes of Eastern Europe and industrial landscapes of the Hudson valley and his home town of Detroit. Working independently throughout his life, Peter Hutton’s body of work stands as a model for a different conception of cinema, a cinema built on attention and observation. Striving to film people and places with dignity, his films offer different images of the world, what Werner Herzog called ‘adequate images’, images by which to better live in and know the world. “The films aren’t about perfection, they’re about trying to get a hold of something and giving it some credibility and quality.”

This screening will be introduced by artist and curator George Clark, who worked alongside Peter Hutton in 2012 on Luke Fowler’s film ‘The Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott.’

Screening follows talk ‘Critical Curating: Artists Moving Image, Contemporary Art and the Museum’ by George Clark 14.00 – 16.30 at National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art, Taichung https://www.ntmofa.gov.tw/chinese/ProjectLecture_1.aspx?SN=4834&n=10049