" Peter Hutton has been compared to Louis Lumière and `the band of peripatetic cameramen...who took the cinematographe around the world at the end of the nineteenth century.' Yet the single-mindedness and consistency of Hutton's sensibility confounds normal categories of the familiar and the exotic, the ordinary and touristic. If his subject is less himself than his surrounding, he still manages to find his personality mirrored in every environment..." - J. Hoberman, Artforum International "(Hutton's films) are truly absorbed in a moment of seeing. Whereas Brakhage films frequently invoke 'loud visual noises,' Hutton's evoke a profound experience of silence...But they are surprisingly strong, not fragile at all, filled with mercurial, almost Taoist resilience, and frequently saved by their good humor...Hutton always found the presence of nature in the city, not only in his many shots of sky and vegetation, but also in the geometry and texture of the city itself which seemed to project an independence from the human. (However) his latest urban film, New York Portrait: Chapter 3, seems to bathe itself in a nostalgia for things human, as if Hutton were looking at a vanishing race. Again humor rather than lamentation prevails, but never has it seemed that people were so contingent in Hutton's films. The high angle of observation...here seems to carry a sense of withdrawal, a distance matched by compassion..." -Tom Gunning The films: New York Portrait: Chapter One (1978-79, 16 mins). New York Portrait: Chapter Two (1980-81, 16 mins). New York Portrait: Chapter Three (1990, c. 15 mins). Landscape Portrait Two (In Titan's Goblet), work-in-progress (1990, c. 15 mins).