Time and Tide (Peter Hutton, 2000)

Original format: 16mm Speed: 24FPS Aspect ratio: Colour: Colour Sound: Silent Length: 35 minutes The first section of the film is a reprint of a reel shot by Billy Bitzer in 1903 titled “Down the Hudson“ for Biograph. It chronicles in single frame time lapse a section of the river between Newburgh, NY and Yonkers. The second section of the film was shot by filmmaker Peter Hutton (1998-99) and records fragments of several trips up and down the Hudson River between Bayonne, New Jersey and Albany, New York. The filmmaker was traveling on the tugboat “Gotham“ as it pushed (up river) and pulled (down river) the Noel Cutler, a barge filled with 35,000 barrels of unleaded gasoline. “In recent years filmmakers as diverse as Abbas Kiarostami, Claire Denis and Stan Brakhage have offered extraordinary films in which landscape and seascape were paramount. It is fitting then, that Hutton, one of the greatest visual poets of the portraiture of place, has just completed his first film in many years - a meditation on the Hudson River. Combining the luminescence and formal contemplation of the Hudson Valley painters with documentary and ecological concerns, Time and Tide extends the panoramic field of Hutton’s previous Portrait of a River. And after decades of an exclusive devotion to and mastery of reversal black and white stocks, Time and Tide marks Hutton’s inaugural foray into color negative.“ - Mark McElhatten