In Titan's Goblet - Peter Hutton (1991)

Taking its title from a surreal Hudson River landscape painting by Thomas Cole circa 1833, In Titan's Goblet inscribes subtle patterns and movements of sky, sun, moon, and fire. Day becomes night, and night day, as the dawn's first light glimmers over a dark copse of trees, fleecy clouds pass like ice floes across the moon, and a bulldozer plows its way across an infernal valley of burning tires.

In Titan's Goblet depicts, in a series of often-stunning, silent, black and white, discrete images the Catskill Mountain area. In this case, however, a sequence of lovely images of what at first appears to be mist in the mountains is slowly revealed to be a distant fire of rubber tires that had burned out of control. That is, Hutton's serene, evocative landscapes are, in this instance, qualified by an environmental problem -- one that confronts our hunger for imagery of pristine nature.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• experimental cinema
• documentary
• short film
• black and white
• avant-garde