"MONO X: A Roll for Peter - Peter Hutton Tribute Program"

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2016 @ Gowanus Darkroom
119 8th Street, Brooklyn, NY, 11215
8:00 - 10:00 PM

PROGRAM

Organized and assembled by Jennifer Reeves and Mark Street, presented by MONO NO AWARE
New York Premiere of films by contributing filmmakers; Jacob Burckhardt, Eric Theise, Nikolas Jaeger, Peter Rose, Eve Heller, Richard Max Gavrich, Timoleon Wilkins, Mary Beth Reed, Lynne Sachs, Audrey Turner, Robbie Land, Fern Silva and students, Max Weinman, Cassandra Bull, Paul Marcus, Roddy Bogawa, Dave Rodriguez, Lana Lin, Josephine Shokrian, George Griffin, Amanda Katz and Josh Lewis, Theodore Rex King, Jordan Stone, Jesse Cain, Michael Wawzenek, Mott Hupfel, Rebecca Leopold, G. Anthony Svatek and Zachary Nichols, David Gatten, Henry Hills, Daryl Meador, Dominic Angerame, the organizing filmmakers, and others.

Peter Hutton’s contemplative, visually arresting landscape and urban films invite us to take our time within silent cinematic tableaux of place, so that we may discover the beauty of overlooked moments. His carefully composed long-duration shots, whether of city, nature, sea or factory, remind us the wonder we can discover in the familiar. As we observe with patience, humility and vulnerability, Peter’s work offers us a sanctuary from the frantic, goal oriented state of current visual culture.

In his own words, “To me one of the most attractive things about cinema is the fact that you can evoke a sense of mystery, of wonder or curiosity in an environment, a landscape, a room, anyplace, by suspending time. So much of the information that we perceive in film is explained or presented to us in such a way that we can’t help but rationalize it. Once someone leaves us to our own interpretive devices, we can feel a great reprieve and the opportunity to actually give something to the work. It’s like a sitting and looking at a painting, at first it might not grab you, but the longer you look at it, the more things reveal themselves. (A Critical Cinema 3, interview with Scott MacDonald)

Many filmmakers and artists were deeply affected by Peter's death in June 2016. Twenty-plus former students, colleagues, and admirers of Peter Hutton answered an invitation to shoot A ROLL FOR PETER. The parameters were simple: shoot a single 100 feet roll of black and white 16mm film. We strung them together with black film separating the rolls, as Peter often separated the single shots in his films. What you’ll see tonight is a series of pieces that speak to Peter’s strong contemplative aesthetic ethos. Each filmmaker will have 2 and half minutes of screen time to commune with Peter’s memory, and the collected rolls will become more than the sum of their parts. Work by Eve Heller, Christopher Harris, Kathryn Ramey, Roddy Bogowa, the organizing filmmakers, and others. Also included in the program, New York Portrait, Chapter I by Peter Hutton, 16 minutes, 16mm, 1979.

Brooklyn-based Jennifer Reeves has made 20+ films since 1990. She constructs visceral and subjective experiences for viewers through 16mm direct-on-film techniques, first-person cinematography, montage and optical-printing. Her experimental-narratives, hand-painted films, and multiple-projection performances, have screened extensively from the Berlin, Toronto, and Hong Kong Film Festivals, to universities, micro-cinemas and museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum and the National Gallery of Art. Retrospectives of her work have been held at Poland’s Era New Horizons Film Festival, Berlin’s Kino Arsenal, Anthology Film Archives, and San Francisco Cinematheque. In 2012 Reeves was named one of the “Best 50 Filmmakers Under 50” in Cinema Scope. Reeves’ 2014 film “Color Neutral” screened at New York, Melbourne and Oberhausen Film Festivals. Currently, Reeves is making her feature “Yankees go South” with the support of a Princess Grace Awards Special Project grant.

Mark Street has been making films, videos and installations for 30 years. His work has moved from tactile, abstract explorations of 16mm film to essays on the urban experience to improvised feature length narratives. He has shown at places like the Museum of Modern Art in New York as well as venues such as a former strip club in New Orleans called the Pussycat Cavern. His latest documentary, Oiltowns (2017), traces boom and bust cycles in North Dakota oil country.

"We are pleased to present this tribute to Peter Hutton film program with Mono No Aware, an organization generously involved in bringing the wondrous and multifarious tradition of first-person cinema into the future with essential inspirational and practical support. Peter Hutton nurtured this rich and varied line of 16mm filmmaking through decades of teaching film students and with his own cinematic offerings to the wider culture. In the spirit of Peter’s down-to-earth and non-competitive approach, Mono No Aware is teaching, exciting and giving tools to a new generation of film artists." - Jennifer Reeves