Untitled (Part One) 1981
“With a hand-held camera, shooting for the most part from an overhead angle, Gehr filmed what remains of the original Jewish immigrants as they go about their daily life-sustaining activities on the streets of the Lower East Side and Brooklyn. Working in close-up, Gehr isolated the gestures, feet, heads. He edited the material into fairly short shots, fashioning a synthetic, closed space which evokes the isolation of the ghetto.
“These elderly people have been filmed and photographed so often that it is difficult to imagine them being handled in an unclichéd and unsentimental manner. But Gehr's film has a balance of distance and intimacy and a respect for the ravages of time that recalls great portrait painting--Franz Hals, Rembrandt, Cezanne. It is an austere and demanding work which cannot be fully comprehended in a single viewing.” Amy Taubin, The Soho News
• A film by Ernie Gehr. (1981, 28 mins, Silent, Color, Print from Filmmakers' Cooperative)

New York Portrait: Chapter One and Chapter Two
“Hutton's black and white haikus are an exquisite distillation of the cinematic eye. The limitations imposed--no color, no sound, no movement (except from a vehicle not directly propelled by the filmmaker), no direct cuts since the images are born and die in black--ironically entail an ultimate freedom of the imagination.... If pleasure can disturb, Hutton's ploys emerge in full focus. These materializing then evaporating images don't ignite, but conjure strains of fleeting panoramas of detached bemusement. More than mere photography, Hutton's contained-within-the-frame juxtapositions are filmic explorations of the benign and the tragic....” Warren Sonbert
• Both films by Peter Hutton. (Chapter One: 1978-79, 16 mins, Silent, Print from Canyon Cinema Cooperative; Chapter Two: 1981, 16 mins, Silent, Print from Filmmaker)