It Don't Pay to Be an Honest Citizen

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. They were then strung together with black film separating the rolls, as Peter often separated the single shots in his films.It is a series of pieces that speak to Peter’s strong contemplative aesthetic ethos. Each filmmaker has 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.

A greedy landlord wants to evict a bicycle shop from his property and replace it with a high-rent-paying art gallery. The environment-conscious owner of the bike shop outwits the avaricious landlord in a high-speed bike chase.

A spy being interrogated by a superior can only guess at the mission, priorities and agenda behind the encounter.

The crumbling beauty of a soon-to-be-demolished, impoverished Red Hook neighborhood in the mid-1970s is revealed to us moment by moment, structure by forgotten structure. The circuslike brass music suggests a public face of “a city in progress” while the addicts, thieves, and other lonely people are shown to us as the human cost: those who will be left out of that development. (Screened 2/17/22 at MoMA as part of Millennium Film Workshop: “Nighttime” NYC event).