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Peter Hutton, In Memory

Peter Hutton, In Memory

at MOCA Grand Avenue, Ahmanson Auditorium, 250 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012

Peter Hutton (1944-2016) was a revered filmmaker and teacher whose life and work had a lasting impact on generations of moving-image artists. His films, which he modestly compared to looking at photo albums or daydreaming, are remarkably reserved, often creating profoundly moving portraits of cities and landscapes from little more than subtly shifting plays of light. His themes were focused and few—the city, the sea, and the landscape, especially the Hudson River Valley—and he brought a keen eye to them all, producing luminous images that seem to float upon the screen. As Tom Gunning writes, “Like the haiku of Bashô, these seemingly simple films offer lessons in the art of seeing and fashioning images that make you wonder how anyone could produce something simultaneously so humble and so astounding.” Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA will honor Hutton’s life and work with a screening of five of his most memorable films and personal reflections from fellow filmmakers and colleagues, including James Benning and Steve Anker.

INFO education@moca.org or 213.621.1745

TICKETS $12 general admission, $7 students with valid ID

FREE for Los Angeles Filmforum and MOCA members

Tickets available in advance at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/258310

Peter Hutton made more than twenty films and was the Charles Franklin Kellogg and Grace E. Ramsey Kellogg Professor of the Arts at Bard College. Born in Detroit, Hutton studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he received both a BFA and an MFA. He taught at Hampshire College, Harvard University, and SUNY Purchase, and began his career at Bard in 1984. His films stemmed from his time as a merchant seaman, when he spent nearly forty years moving across the globe, usually by cargo ship, to create cinematic studies of places such as the Yangtze River or a ship graveyard in Bangladesh. A retrospective of his films was shown at MoMA in 2008 and he also had work in the 1985, 1991, 1995, and 2004 Whitney Biennials. Last year he was included in a two-person show with James Benning at Miguel Abreu in New York. He received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, DAAD Berliner, and the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as a Dutch Film Critics Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. –Artforum

Programmed by Madison Brookshire

Acknowledgements:

Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA is supported through both organizations by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission. Additional support of Filmforum's screening series comes from the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles. We also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors. 

Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA furthers MOCA’s mission to question and adapt to the changing definitions of art and to care for the urgency of contemporary expression with bimonthly screenings of film and video organized and co-presented by Los Angeles Filmforum—the city’s longest-running organization dedicated to weekly screenings of experimental film, documentaries, video art, and experimental animation.

For more on Los Angeles Filmforum, visit lafilmforum.org, or email lafilmforum@yahoo.com.

For more information on The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, visit moca.org.

 

New York Near Sleep for Saskia

1972, 16mm, black and white, silent, 10 minutes

New York Portrait, Chapter I

1979, 16mm, black and white, silent, 16 minutes

New York Portrait, Chapter II

1981, 16mm, black and white, silent, 16 minutes

In Titan's Goblet

1991, 16mm, black and white, silent, 10 minutes

Study of a River

1997, 16mm, black and white, silent, 16 minutes