When Peter Hutton was 18, he signed up to become a merchant seaman. He spent 10 years traveling international waters, a monastic experience that informs every frame of his meditative experimental films. At the age of 16, Steven Spielberg had already completed a 140 minute sci-fi movie entitled Firelight. In a Q&A that kicked off the wonderful Hutton retro that recently ended at the Museum of Modern Art, the director cited the Lumiere Brothers as his model. If one traced the origins of the fantastical genre flicks that fueled Spielberg's ever expanding toy box, they would inevitably end up at the feet of Georges Melies, the original film fabulist. And so, from this admittedly selective comparison, over the past month NYC has presented the central antinomy of cinema on competing screens: the quiet realist landscapes of Hutton, and the gimcrack fakery of Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Both filmmakers are masters of their own domains, and if I got more pleasure out of the Huttons, I suppose it was a matter of temperament. Or of a way of seeing.

Hutton's films are simple. He selects a setting, whether the Hudson River (Study of a River (1994-1995)) or the Icelandic coastline (Skagafjordur (2002-2004)), and composes a study of the area in static, silent, and usually B&W 16mm shots. Like the Lumieres, he just plops his camera down and shoots, and his compositional sense is just as acute as theirs. His landscapes are imposing and eerily depopulated, lacking any easy identificatory figure, as his backgrounds (mountains, treetops, skyscrapers) loom over barren foregrounds (sheep, rivers, humans). His New York Portraits (1978-1990) are post-action scenes, hollowed out shells of rooms, street corners, flophouses. The people shown scurrying about in a sped up snowstorm are specters, not full-bodied characters. As P. Adams Sitney wrote in a recent Artforum piece, there's a lingering sense of loneliness to his films, because each shot so clearly reflects its maker and the time he endured to capture each special set of circumstances. These are not films to be swept away in, but to be subsumed by.

Each shot is a discrete entity, and Hutton separates them with black leader when he edits together his features. It is a cinema of radical freedom for the viewer - allowing us to construct narratives, dissect compositions, or zone out thinking about one's fantasy baseball team. I found myself choosing the middle route, attempting to guess when Hutton would choose to end individual shots, looking for hidden symmetries in the image (will he cut when the last car train passes off-screen?, when the ship's prow is centered between two mountains?).  It's an open-ended conversation between maker and viewer, but Hutton still finds time for some visual stunners, especially in his great Time and Tide (1998-2000), which charts the travels of ice-breaking ships on the Hudson. In one breathtaking sequence, Hutton simply films, in color, the white icy expanse off the side of a ship, until the earth slowly cracks open and reveals the dark void beneath. It's that rare instance in his films where he manipulates the viewer's look, pulling the rug out from the expectation of just another icily pretty landscape in a film full of them.

Spielberg, of course, makes his coin off of such manipulations, and Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull finds him orchestrating another impressive audience pleasing machine.  18 years after the Last Crusade, and 7 years after his turn to darker thematic material (starting with the still grievously underrated AI (2001)), Crystal Skull proves that he can still tap his inner 16 year old when the box office demands it.  Harrison Ford labors to feign interest, but the drag is minimal, as the breeze is in the brashly imaginative chase sequences, the hammy character turns by Cate Blanchett and John Hurt, and the sub-pulp level scenario which leaps from non-sensical to Vincent Price cheapie territory after the inanimate lucite cranium gets Indy all googly-eyed.  As crass Hollywood cash-ins go, it's well crafted and pretty damn entertaining. Even Melies might blush at the sheer artificiality of some of the action set-pieces, which includes some army Jeep fencing and Tarzan-like vine swinging from a Wild One era Brando impersonator. With its monster box office haul over Memorial Day weekend, and the Hutton retro's far from sold-out run, it's clear that Melies still holds the championship belt from their century long battle, with Lumiere taking the critic's choice award, at least for now.

R. Emmet Sweeney

(June, 2008)