The Hudson and the Yangtze
A Conversation with Peter Hutton

Peter Hutton, an experimental and avant-garde filmmaker, is very interested in the Hudson River. He has already made two films about it, and he plans another. The first, Study of a River, Part I, is a winter idyll shot in an austere black and white. In it the frame remains steady–no panning, no following the eye–while the images move through or within it: ice floes, girders, the silos at Cementon, brilliant flecks of light on a puddle, changing light as clouds pass. The second, Time and Tide, is in color; to make it he rode a tugboat the length of the river between Bayonne and Albany. The New York Times says of the film that on one level it is "a meditation on the river, its ecology, the changing sky and the shifting landscape" and on another a "contemplation of velocity and the relativity of motion." A number of images are shot through portholes, superimposing a round frame on the usual rectangular one with the riverscape passing through it. Now he is planning another. This one, as he explains below, is planned to intercut scenes from the Hudson with scenes from the Yangtze. He has received a grant supporting this enterprise from the Minetta Brook foundation. The following conversation took place a few days before his departure for China. HVRR plans another conversation when he returns for its next issue. Here the microphone was turned on, in medias res, when the conversation turned to the foundation supporting artists interested in the Hudson River.* Peter Hutton’s films are silent as though seeing the world without the need to talk about it is sufficient.

PH: . . . was commissioning, I think, about half dozen artists to do the Hudson River Valley, film people, video people, photographers. Diane Shamash who set up the foundation that’s sponsoring [my project] told me that she’s commissioned a number of people to do pieces on the Thames, in London. So there’s a, I don’t know, maybe it’s just the times and the timely quality of relating to rivers in this day and age. Because they’re so, they’re both being reclaimed and they’re endangered.

WW: Do you think it’s something new?

PH: No, I think it’s probably, I keep Life on the Mississippi next to my bed–

WW: I was going to say–

PH: And I love to go off into that. And it really feels like the same discussion in many ways.

WW: It’s two parts, right? The first part is idealized memory of his early years, the second part his response to the new industry that’s come in.

PH: I just read this piece where this riverboat explodes, I can’t remember, somewhere, I think Hannibal. But it’s this extraordinary image of this thing that has vanished from the river.

W.W But the foundation?

P.H. They presented this artist, her name was, this isn’t so interesting but I’ll tell you anyway to get something going, Marie Jose Berki, who’s a Swiss artist, and she spent three years interviewing people along the river–

WW: Along the Hudson.

PH: Along the Hudson, mostly the lower Hudson, around Manhattan and Staten Island, in that area. And [she] then ended up doing up these sort-of-portraits of the people, in a very slow-motion way with a film camera that shot actually high speed so when you see the image, people are moving ever so slowly. But the other interesting thing was, they projected it on the ventilation towers to the Holland Tunnel; these are these big, austere pieces of architecture, and they had this humongous video projector that costs, for ten days it costs $30,000, not that that’s important, but it’s industrial-strength projection. We went down with some friends, and you could stand on Spring Street, way, you know, almost–

WW The portraits were projected onto the towers?

PH: Onto the side of a tower. It was amazing, watching these images of people moving about in this dreamlike state. But it was nice.

[ . . . . ]

WW: The river in China?

PH: Part of what is going to happen with my project, which is called "Two Rivers" as a working title–I don’t know quite what to call it, but I think I’ll give it a Chinese title when I go to China–is to compare in a very abstract way, the, the spirit of what a river is, more than a literal documentation of a river. Even though what I want to do in the three weeks that I go down the Yangtze is to sort of document everything, what I’m really interested in is more transcendental, almost an idea of a river that’s not graphically concrete; it’s more, a little bit more, mysterious, a little bit more about the atmosphere of a place. So a lot of smoke, a lot of mist, a lot of steam, a lot of pollution, whatever, these contemporary atmospheres, I think will tie the rivers together. There’s a beautiful phenomenon on the Hudson and I’ve read that it occurs also in the Three Gorges area of China. Sailors call it sea smoke, and it’s a really a mist that accumulates over the water when there’s an extreme variance between water temperature and air temperature. And it can be incredibly beautiful, not rounded off like fog often looks, but more cirrus-like where it goes up into these very interesting plumes. So–

WW: I think there’s a shot of that in your winter film?*

PH: No.

WW: No?

PH: No, but I’ve always wanted to get that kind of atmosphere. I’ve been looking at a lot of Turner paintings, J. W. M. Turner; he was so committed to a place in between something concrete and something that was more transcendent; in a way that they had a huge relationship to atmosphere and weather and almost a sense of destructiveness in the atmosphere, a doom, or an apocalyptic thing. The interesting relationship between the two rivers is both the fact that in China, the Three Gorges Dam is now being [built], as we all know, maybe a third finished, and Mingxia Li, the woman that I’m going with–I talked to her two days ago and she said she read in a Chinese paper that there was a big landslide near Chongqing, where we’re going to start our voyage down the river, as a result of the dam. So already there’s this little–

WW: The sides are rebelling–

PH: The sides are coming down as a result of this huge excavation. The largest engineering [project] that’s ever been undertaken by man anywhere. It’s amazing. And then, we don’t know what’s going to happen with the Hudson, obviously. There’s this dredging thing. But the idea is that both rivers have traditionally been a source of tremendous artistic inspiration for writers, for painters, but also have fulfilled this very practical industrial function as well, really being sewers for the industry and the communities along both the rivers’ banks. Paul Theroux in his, there’s an excerpt of his book, Sailing Through China, and he talks about the corpses coming down the river, it was such a frequent occurrence. He describes the Yangtze as this wonderful vessel of inspiration but also that it has this absolutely dreadful other connotation of being a place where people shit and dump anything they don’t want. Up until twenty years ago, the Hudson certainly fulfilled that role as well–

WW: Sure did.

PH: It’ll be interesting to try to weave together this aspect of the rivers as well. Not just so much the transcendent, romantic, beautific aspect, but more the utilitarian idea of what a river–I told in writing to this foundation, I said that I was really much more interested in something that’s abstract and metaphoric than a literal thing, even though I think there’ll be a breath of literalness woven throughout this–the idea of blending both rivers together. Someone told me that an extraordinary thing you see are these hay barges that go down the Yangtze, which are just traditional flat barges, but with hundred-foot loads of hay on them, glistening in the sun. And I thought, oh my god, it’s like an apparition, this thing. And they said the light hits it and it’s just dazzling, pieces of straw are blowing off. And I thought, my god, if I could capture things like that, and contrast them with other kinds of vehicles that we might encounter on the Hudson, it could be fascinating. But to keep the viewer in a place where you don’t know really where you are: is this cement factory in China or is this cement factory in Hudson, New York? They both have a certain functional design. Which is which? I don’t even know if I can find those relationships. But from what I’ve read, on the Yangtze there’s a tremendous amount of ugly industry along the river, and the Three Gorges has only recently, in the last ten, fifteen years, become a more protected [place], something that people are obviously trying to exploit in a more monumental tourist-cultural way. It’ll be fascinating just to see what’s, how the two–

WW: So in the final product, you’re thinking of intercutting the two rivers–

PH: Yeah. But I, you know, this is my plan, I mean, my god, I might come back and say, boy that was a stupid idea. Why pollute China with New York, and why, maybe I’ll make something separate, and show them side to side, or something like that. The wonderful thing, for me as a filmmaker, though, is this commission avails some more experimental ways to present the work. Someone you might remember, I’ve thought about my friend Jon Rubin quite a bit, but he pioneered something called the Floating Cinema, which was really two barges that had projectors and screens–

WW: Yes, I know of those.

PH: And I thought wouldn’t it be wonderful actually to show the film of the Yangtze floating down the Hudson. So you could go stand along the river at night and watch these images float by. It would be great maybe to think about doing something like that, that would really engage the river in a visual way, but also in a more metaphoric way. To really do something experimental, even though the beauty of film is you can have it a variety of different ways. This foundation has made these new options available. One of the things that’s interesting is the technology now is using DVD, for example, where you can put your film on a disk. Then a lot of more flexible presentation ideas become available, which is great. The projector is still a nineteenth-century tool, the mechanical projector that I’m so dependent on, a grinding mechanical thing. Whereas the DVD suggests a more quiet and also less obtrusive way to present it, which could make it more sublime or more mysterious, depending on how it’s presented.

WW: You could change all kinds of things, focus, and–

PH: Yeah, but it’s mostly the idea there’s this quiet thing. It’s also quite small. It’s even conceivable that I could float a projector out on the water and have it magically appear on a floating surface somewhere.

WW: But your filming is going to be with–

PH: Yeah. Yeah, I’m documenting both rivers in 16-millimeter film, and then when I’m finished, I’ll make a film print, a traditional film print, and then also make a DVD copy. This is something that people in my little experimental film culture are doing more of, to explore the gallery-museum world as an option for showing films, that traditionally have always been in a little theater. Now with this new technology, you can show it almost anywhere. It’s not such a big undertaking.

WW: Are there better and better DVD projectors?

PH: Yeah. I mean the quality’s always, but it’s improving dramatically. The maddening thing about technology is that they eke it out slowly because it’s such a consumer thing. A few years ago it was quite expensive to get [a film put on] a DVD, but now a number of computer companies, Apple, Sony, have made small affordable computers that have the capacity to make DVDs. So something that was once the domain of the industry or the commercial world is now accessible to consumers. And the quality is pretty consistent, which is interesting. Someone you might remember–

[ . . . . ]

WW: How did you first start thinking about China?

PH: I’ve always wanted to go–I lived in Southeast Asia for a number of years, and one time I took a trip down the Mekong and went from northern Thailand down to Vientiane, but stopped in a place called Luang Prabang, which is, it’s referred to as the religious capitol of Laos. It’s a beautiful Buddhist town on the Mekong. And I remember standing (this is during the Vietnam war), you could actually see [across the border], and people told me in Luang Prabang that there were North Vietnamese troops bivouacked up on these mountains. And of course your imagination made it all the more exotic because of the climate of the times. Luang Prabang was also a stronghold of the Pathet Lao, the communist party; there was a coalition government in Laos at the time. It was very exciting to be in this forbidden landscape. But the most beautiful part of it was that there was the classic Asian landscape where you saw the Mekong snaking off into what was eventually China. I thought, my god, it’s so exotic and so timeless, it looked like one of those classic Chinese paintings, and it was so alluring. So ever since then I’ve sort of thought about going to China and doing some kind of study of the landscape. In the 80s, I was asked to propose something to the Rockefeller Foundation and I wrote a proposal about traveling from Shanghai across China to Tibet. I thought it was a great project. It would be a kind of documentation of me traveling across the Chinese landscape. I made a lot of preparations, and read a lot of books, wrote what I thought was a fantastic proposal, and it was turned down. So the seeds of China have been with me for a long time.

Of course, one of the interesting things was reading. I’ve been doing a lot of reading of Henry Hudson’s travels. He made four voyages across the Atlantic; [on] the fourth one he died in the Arctic area. He was put in a small boat with his son and set adrift by the crew of his ship because they were so exasperated by his relentless quest of the north, this northern route to Asia, that as we know all the explorers of that region were looking for, a trade route to China. In the reading I’ve done, there was no sense he thought he was going to China when he entered the straits [of what is now New York harbor], the bay that eventually led to the Hudson. But it was the idea that he thought that this was a waterway that might eventually connect up to another waterway that might eventually take them to China. And it’s fascinating to think of what an alluring quest that was for these early navigators because it promised such a payback in terms of the wealth, the imagined riches of the Orient. It’s interesting because in the early encounters that he writes of, even though there are just fragments of his diary that exist, there was a guy named Robert Juet, who was his pilot,* who kept a pretty detailed log of their travels of the Hudson, and he documents the initial encounters with the Indians. The men on the ship were so–this was the Half Moon–were so overwhelmed by the abundance of the river, fish and shellfish, and when they met the Indians, the Indians brought maize and deer, and it was just like, oh my god, these flatland Europeans came to this valley and their first smell was of fruit trees and wild fruit in the fields. They thought they were in heaven; they would scoop up copious amounts of oysters and clams, and it was like, the irony, of course, is that the Dutch settled and took advantage of these resources, but one wonders about this ultimate objective of getting to the East. This wasn’t a transitional thing. And when you think of the absolute disastrous relationships that developed with the Indians in terms of what first was a kind of a love fest, that turned very quickly into a kind of a war with the Indians. How soon the fantasy landscape turned into something absolutely horrific.

WW: And led to very problematic treaties.

PH: And then the ruthlessness of the Dutch’s early, I still don’t know, I’ve read a variety of different books that address this, but I haven’t, I’m just beginning to put together my early New York history, but it’s mostly because of my interest in the river.

WW: Are you able to find anything that is not strictly comparable between the Hudson and the Yangtze; let’s say you won’t find the first person who sailed up the Yangtze. . . .

PH: There’s a great deal of stuff. I just finished a very interesting contemporary book. I was trying to, the nineteenth century is filled with these wonderful travel records of Europeans going up the Yangtze, and I have yet to really take on one; I’ve read a lot of excerpts. I have a great travel book on the Yangtze, and it references a lot of these books, and I’m sure I’ll take on more once I go there and get a sense of the history by experiencing it. Anyway, I read this very interesting new book by Peter Hessler called Two Years on the Yangtze.* He writes for The New Yorker occasionally. He spent two years in Fuling, which is on the Yangtze, and it’s a rather uneventful industrial town; he went there as a Peace Corps English teacher. He really writes about the point of view of his being an American in China, and dealing with the attitudes of his students, and the people that he encounters, and his two years wandering around that area. It’s quite interesting, it’s a very journalistic kind of writing; it’s not lyrical or particularly imaginative, but it’s very informative and very helpful in terms of setting the social climate I’ll probably encounter along the river. So it was good for me to get a better, a more realistic sense rather than some overly romanticized, even though I’m hugely capable of swooning into that.

WW: Tell me how you’re going to make your way on the river itself.

PH: Well, we’re going to Shanghai and then flying up to Chongqing, which is one of the larger towns in the western end of the Yangtze, and then in an improv jumping on short, on different ships, zigzagging down the river.

WW: Steamers that carry goods?

PH: Yeah, yeah. And there are passenger ships as well, but I’m staying away from the big tourist boats because they’re absolutely horrendous looking; they look like a hotel that’s been sort of cut in half and shaped like a ship and stuck on this river. It’s grotesque. Even though the ships aren’t that much more, they’re more practical and functional, they carry cargo as well as people. I want to experience it at a more local level.

WW Will you get down on the river itself?

PH: Oh yeah, hopefully. And I think there’s a lot of little side trips you can take into the smaller rivers that flow into the Yangtze, that have equi–I should have brought my book, I have this beautiful, this book, sort of a tourist book on the Yangtze. Amazing photographs, to give you a better idea of where the drama of the geography–

[ . . . . ]

PH: Well, the idea of going with Mingxia is that we can be more independent. Everyone says it’s so hard being independent if you don’t speak Chinese. It’s interesting because I’m also meeting up with a Bard student named Blanca Lista, who’s Spanish, who’s a film major and also a Chinese major. She speaks fluent Chinese, so she was going to be [a guide]. After I do the Yangtze for two and a half weeks, then I’m going to go down to an area called Guilin, which is in southwestern China and has this very mythological landscape, very flat, with rivers flowing through it, and then these amazing mountains that pop up through the flatness. Like dragon tails or dinosaur backs, I mean it’s mythologically so enchanting. It’s a major tourist area in China, that’s the downside of it. But it’s early enough in the season, the tourist season I think peaks in the fall, so I’ve read, and it goes on, it starts in the spring, it peaks in autumn. . . . I really want to do a lot of filming of this Chinese landscape. I really want to do more than just the Yangtze. I figure this will probably be a one-shot experience as far as that goes. Maybe not.

AW: Does Peter know W_____ in Beijing?

PH: No.

AW: We should tell him you’re coming and give you his address.

PH: Beijing, I’m not even going close to Beijing. Shanghai is it, in terms of the big city, and when I go back to Shanghai after two and a half weeks and Mingxia goes back to New York, and then Blanca comes, and I’m flying with her to Guilin and then eventually back to Shanghai, and then Shanghai back to New York at some point.

WW: Mingxia is Chinese?

PH: Mingxia is Chinese, she’s a doctor, she studied medicine in Beijing. She’s agreed to, I’m paying for her trip, she’s agreed to be my guide for two and a half weeks, because she’s always wanted to go to this area and this is an opportunity for her to see it.

WW: That’ll be super because it will get you past the awkwardness and tedium of making your own way.

PH: Yeah, yeah. That was the idea, to try to at least see it from the point of view of a Chinese person rather than these grotesque–

WW: How far up the Yangtze do you go, do you think?

PH: Oh I wish I had brought my book! Geographically I really need to point it out.

WW: I can get a map.

PH: Yeah, let’s look at a map. Because it’s considerably west, but certainly there’s a lot of space beyond that. There’s a wonderful area called Leaping Tiger Gorge, that I talked to an American woman who is working on a project where she’s comparing the Yangtze and the Mississippi. How about that? This is like, I said, oh god, not another river project. I’m not going to tell people what I’m doing. But she said that Leaping Tiger Gorge is one of the most spectacular, but it’s in an area of the Yangtze that’s not–here we go. I thought, did I see China?

WW: Not yet.

PH: Oh, here’s part of it. Yeah, here we go. Here’s, yup, the . . . let’s see, that’s Burma, Chengdu. It starts somewhere up in here. Of course, the Yangtze with the Mekong and all these rivers, start up here in Tibet someplace, let’s leave China down here. Here we go, here we go. Shanghai and Nanjing, Wu-han, see it’s interesting because the name, oh here’s Wu Gon, Chongqing, so we’re flying here. But let’s look at–

WW: And then you go up further?

PH: No, no. You can go all the way up to way up north, I believe, but the Three Gorges are east of Chongqing. The idea is to go to Chongqing and then slowly go down the river. Because it flows from west to east. And it’s also in two weeks, you have to haul butt. You have to really move. And I want to spend at least two days in each place. So we’re sort of doing here for two days, there for two days, there for two days, there for two days, and then I’m going down to, let’s see, down here and this is the extraordinary landscape, this area around here. Guilin is one of the cities, the main city, but then there’s another city, I can’t pronounce this [Yangszhou on the Lijiang River].

WW: Do you speak any Chinese at all?

PH: No. I hope I’ll pick up a little, but it’s too much to even begin to take on right now. I’m so undisciplined in that area. It would be wonderful to speak, when I lived in Thailand for two years I could speak ragtag Thai. Someone would say, where are you going, and I could tell them where I was going, or I wanted this or that, the bare necessities of survival. Counting, and things like that. It’s interesting, I didn’t even notice these scrolls, beautiful.

[ . . . . ]

WW: Will you try to incorporate people into the film?

PH: I hope to do portraits, I would love to do portraits of people. But it’s always a touchy thing. One of the more awkward parts of the book I read was about these two fellows who were teaching English in Fuling. They’d been there for two years and had wonderful relationships with the local people, never really were involved in photography or anything. But one of their friends, who was also in the Peace Corps, came–oh what a beautiful, that yellow–

WW: Goldfinch?

PH: Goldfinch, yeah. Wonderful.

[ . . . . ]

P.H. But anyway, one of their friends from another city came to visit them, in Fuling and brought a video camera, a rather large industrial-model video camera. And said, why don’t you guys record some of the local stuff so you’ll have a little tape you can take back with you. So something happened, and I can’t, something that involved a steamed bun. The two boys were out in the street filming, and one of them threw the steamed bun out in the street; this was one of the worst things they could have done with food. Someone got hugely offended that these two Americans were clowning around and throwing food around and before they knew it, a crowd of people gathered around them. The temperature started rising, and they realized that they were in a real pickle. They both spoke very good Chinese, and so very carefully they tried to extract themselves from the situation, to try to defuse it. But they couldn’t, there was one man that was particularly agitated, and he was getting other people agitated. It all came about because of this damn camera. And so when I read that I went, oh shit, this is not good.

WW: "Don’t point that thing at me!"

PH: Exactly. That’s what I thought of, oh my god, I have to be very tactful if I do want to film someone. But I think the good thing of being with Mingxia and having her as someone who may be–

WW: Who’ll have the sense of a situation.

PH: What’s appropriate and what isn’t. I’m not, my daughter keeps saying, when are you going to make a film about people? All these more abstract things that I’ve been doing all my life, there are really very few people that appear in my films. But one of the reasons I avoid people is for that reason. Both the expectations that they have, and the fact that any kind of camera connotes something not so wonderful.

WW: You’re capturing the soul. But also the moment the camera points at you, you become self-conscious. You clown or clam up. Do filmmakers still use those cameras that point ahead but take pictures to the side?

PH: It’s interesting, Helen Levitt–you know James Agee, that film that you showed, In the Street, I met Helen in New York in the 70s and she was friendly with a woman named Elaine Mayes who’s a photographer who I taught with at Hampshire College. We all got together one night and I showed her some of my New York films, and she said, let’s do something together. And I said, well what? It’d be such a privilege to do something with Helen Levitt. And so I went to her house, her apartment in the Village about a week later, and we had some sherry and talked about the idea of doing a little collaboration. And she said, well we have to use this camera that so-and-so gave me (he was some famous guy from the 40s).* I said, well Helen, I would prefer doing something more direct. Trying to be a purist about it. She said, oh, we can do both. She said, well, are you going to raise the money. I said, Helen, you’re the celebrity here, I’m just piggybacking on your notoriety. We couldn’t get it together. She was hoping that I would take the initiative, and I didn’t really have the occasion or right to do it.

WW: Street scenes?

PH: Yeah, we were going to go out and shoot stuff in New York. It’s one of my great regrets that we never did.

[ . . . . ]

PH: But there was something I was going to mention. One of the relationships that interests me is the idea of the machine in the landscape, too. I think this comes from Turner, from looking at so much of his work, where he’s painting a steamboat, or there’s a mingling of smoke with this atmosphere of light, this ambiance of the whole thing, which is so interesting. I keep thinking, some of the early Hudson River School paintings of dredges and barges on the river, that have that industrial quality, there were some painters, I’m so bad at names, but the idea that in this beautiful landscape are also a lot of instances of this [machine] presence. And that really interests me.

WW: In Turner they’re always emerging from the mist or disappearing into the mist, not as though he’d set up an opposition. And I remember that in your winter film, the shot of the cement plant, if you remember, on the edge of the river. It’s there in the mist, moving below it–

PH: Oh oh, the silos, in [across from] Germantown. Yeah, yeah, the cement silos. Fog goes through. Well so much of the delightful part of tying [industry] in to the river is that it’s always changing, that it’s this organic thing that always presents a different image of itself. And that’s so exciting for me, too. To understand that the landscape does that, it’s very much about having the time to sit and observe. One of the great things about traveling on the tugs up and down the river, is that it’s such a slow enterprise, these tugboats. Particularly when you’re going against the–

WW: The current, the tides going out.

PH: And–

Cat: Meowww [becomes increasingly loud].

[ . . . . ]

PH: [On the tug] you’re watching the landscape, and it’s just barely moving. It’s fascinating to have that slowdown relationship to things. We’re so used to going at this heightened velocity, in a car, in a train, in a plane, or whatever.

WW: Speed was what was so exciting in the early films–.

PH: You haven’t seen the second part of the river films, which is called Time and Tide. And it opens with this clip, that was shot by Billy Bitzer, and he strapped himself to the front of a steamboat in 1907 and single-cranked his way from Newburgh down to Yonkers.* And it takes a total of one minute, so the film starts out with this incredibly intense kinetic bzhdzhwhzhzhzh, zooming down the Hudson. And then my film starts; it’s incredibly slow. The irony of this turn-of-the-century intensity and then this languid end-of-the-twentieth century thing; it’s a nice contrast.

WW: In the winter film as I remember, the frame is pretty much asserting itself, and the movement is taking place outside it, so to speak.

PH: In the winter stuff. Certainly, it’s things going on within, whereas on the barges I’m using the porthole; it’s a moving platform, that avails itself in such an interesting way to look at the landscape. For me. It’d be great to have you see it, because it’s really considerably different from the winter landscape. It’s more an industrial portrait of the Hudson. And it sets up this idea that all rivers have this dual function. Even though I want to articulate that, in some way [in the new film] I want to push it into the background as well, and try to make a film that’s much more mysterious: we don’t know where we are–is this China, is this New York, what is it. As a way to support more a metaphoric idea of what is a river. I have to show you the new film. I have this one print that I made, because I was having such a hard time. And it’s in Japan right now, showing in Yokohama and Tokyo and another city, a little festival that’s traveling around. Definitely, when I come back, we’ll look at that.

WW: Good

PH: There was a film made by David Lynch, who’s a contemporary director that did Blue Velvet, which was such a popular film ten years ago, but he made a film for Disney, which was kind of amazing–like Lenny Bruce making a film for Disney–a very unlikely director to work for Disney. But it was based on a story of a man who drove his sit-down lawnmower across three states to visit his dying brother. It’s called The Straight Story. The film is really this guy traveling across the Midwest on his lawnmower, you couldn’t experience a slower thing, and he picks up hitchhikers, and he has all these crazy adventures. But I thought, my barge film is actually slower than the guy on the lawnmower. There are times when you’re going against the tide that you’re barely making headway, it’s wonderful.

WW: How long will that film run?

PH: The proposal was to do nothing more than, I think I said 40 minutes, on the new film, the weaving together. But I have taken enough film, that I could come away, I’m probably shooting about three hours of material, out of that, it depends on what works. I don’t really know. It’s interesting, because most of my luggage is film, very few clothes, some toiletry stuff, razor, a toothbrush, some asthma medication–

WW: Wash-and-wear shirts.

PH: Yeah, exactly. Mostly film. It’s so damn heavy.

WW: And this is something you have to take.

PH: Yeah, I just met someone who said, oh you can buy that in Shanghai. But it would be too complicated to try to choreograph, when I lived in southeast Asia, I had all the film, I bought all the film in Bangkok and had it–mention to anyone that I’m doing this film, I’m just going as a tourist, with a–

WW: You mean, that the, the official–

PH: The official authorities, yeah, so I haven’t really touched [?] in with anyone.

WW: So you’re going on a tourist visa.

PH: I felt it would be too much of a headache to do anything more official. Then you have this expectation that might come about, and–

WW: They’d be watching you more carefully, that’s for sure.

PH: Exactly.

WW: They might be watching you doubly if they suddenly see you with all that stuff. How big is your camera?

PH: It’s good size. But it’s not a monster thing. There’s a wonderful, a wonderful horrible story of Antonioni, the Italian director, who was invited to China by Chou En Lai, in the 60s to make a film, sort of a documentary that he shot in 35 millimeter. This was at a time when the Maoist cadres were still around, and there was still a Maoist fervor in the air, and so he had a very hard time. But there was someone, in something I was reading about China, was articulating this episode where he made a shot of a new bridge, I think it was in Nanjing, and they made this rather new bridge. And he was filming this bridge, as this hugely important accomplishment, a bridge across the Yangtze, and in the foreground of the shot was some laundry, some laundry hanging on a clothesline. When he screened the rushes, someone, one of the Maoist people assigned to the production, saw it and went ballistic. And said, this is unacceptable, you’re depicting China in a backwards way, we can’t have this. Just today, I was reading that in California where they’re having this terrible energy crisis, that a lot of these home associations have banned clotheslines from suburban tracts, as something that’s unsightly and so–one of them, they were saying that people are discovering nature again, the beauty of the wind and the sun. And now they can’t even put the damn clothesline up, because it’s against the bylaws of the community. Talk about horrible fate. And today, there’s a cartoon about it, in "Doonesbury" today.

WW: Well, there will be a lot of property along the Yangtze, from what I understand, also rural property as well as industrial.

PH: A lot of the resentment to this dam, a lot of the acceptance is that it’s going to bring electrification to these rural areas that haven’t been plugged in to the larger, more prosperous new China. There’s a lot of resentment to the resettlements that is going on, they have displaced more than a million and a half people, or they’re in the process of displacing them. The fact that this has all happened so quickly, the history is being submerged. And a lot of people’s relationship to their place. It’s rather dreadful.

WW: It’s displacement of huge population.

PH: Yeah.

WW: People who’ve been settled for a long time. I did hear an "expert" speculating on the radio that the dam would be built but never closed.

PH: Never–

WW: Never actually operated. They’d never close it. They have to build it now because they’ve got so much politics–

PH: They have so much Western money behind it, too.

WW: The problems will have been mounting year after year after year, will become obviously overwhelming–

PH: But the talk is about then opening up the Yangtze to real international trade where huge ships will be able to ply the river. Small towns will be turned into bigger ports. This vision of commerce–

WW: You mean on the other side of the side of the dam? They will be under water.

PH: There’s a lake that’s going to develop, huge; I can’t even comprehend it it’s so big. The level is supposed to rise 360 feet in the Three Gorges, so that’s rather–it’s already risen almost 100 feet–

WW: Something like that.

PH: But it’s going to go two-and-a-half more up. So imagine, down by West Point. If we were to–

WW: It would submerge West Point.

PH: West Point would be under water. I know, I know. One of the things I’ve heard from my tugboat friends, Gary and Annie, who were in China ten years ago, and they said one of the amazing things of the Three Gorges is that the scale is so grand and so huge, that it could survive this flooding. Even though the consequences are horrific.

WW: It’ll still be an amazing landscape.

PH: It’ll still be this amazing place. And they think that that’s why the Chinese are so gung ho, there’s something so powerful about the landscape that they don’t feel that they’re going to hugely alter it. It’s interesting because Gary said, they were there ten years ago, this is my, Gary who is the engineer on the tugboats that I rode on, he went there to look at old steam locomotives, he’s so interested in engines, so he traveled in all these rural areas looking for these old legendary steam locomotives, and found a lot of them. And made little films about them. He said the most amazing thing he saw was in a town called, I think, Leshan, which is not too far north of Chongqing, where there’s one of the biggest Buddhists, and they went there to see this large standing Buddha, maybe it’s a sitting Buddha, I’m not sure. Anyway, he saw trackers on the river, which were men whose lives were spent pulling barges along the river. This was on another river that flowed into the Yangtze. He heard this drumming, and they went down to the water, and there were 300 men pulling the barge, and they were all horizontal under the stress, and there was someone drumming a cadence. And they would vmmmm vmmmmm, take another step. He said it was the most astounding thing he could ever, he was stunned to see that, to behold 300 men doing something that was–

WW: Coordinated in that primitive way.

PH: So I thought, oh my god, if I could see something like that, or film something like that. But I mentioned it to Mingxia, and she said, oh, stop it, you’re not going to see something like that in this day and age. But people have mentioned that if you get way off the beaten path back into some of these mountain rivers, you see a much more–in the book I read, Two Years on the Yangtze, he, one of the boys was a jogger, and he would jog up into the mountains around Fuling, and he would find the most delightful people in these little farming communities up in the hills, that really had no connection with the rest of society. And he said it was some of his most wonderful moments, sitting down and chatting with these people. They were always astounded to see this American come running down the road. And they’re out in the field with their oxen, clearing a rice paddy. And they were even more astounded to realize that he spoke great Chinese, and they would often invite him in for a meal. I thought, wouldn’t it be wonderful to have experiences like that, where we could go back in time, and get more of a sense of the landscape that’s been there forever, that hasn’t been affected by anything. Maybe in Guilin, if we can get off the beaten path into some backwaters.

WW: Your guide there will be–

PH: Different guide, and she’s been there before. She’s young and she’s very spunky and she’s fearless, in a certain way. She’s been to China twice on her own. She actually lived with a, when she first went she made a wonderful little video of a very well-known brush painter. Lived with him and his family in some city north of Beijing, and she stayed there for a summer. And made a beautiful little video of him, practicing and doing his brush painting. When I saw it I was so touched that she would, that she had the nerve or the whatever to go and to put herself in a situation like that. She’s absolutely wonderful that way. I’m lucky we crossed paths. I saw her, I haven’t been around much this year, but I saw her one day and I said that I was going to China and I wanted to let her know because I knew how involved in China [she was], and she said, oh, I’m going to China, too. And I said, well, I’m going to be in Shanghai the end of May. And she said, oh too bad, because I’ll be there in the middle of June. And I said, well then I’m going to Guilin, and she said oh, I’m going to Guilin. And I said, well wait a minute here. And she was actually going to be there two weeks later, but I said well listen, if you’re there at the same time, I’ll be happy to help you out a little bit if you can help me. So, boom, she shifted her plans. I’m buying her ticket from Hong Kong to Shanghai, which is 200 bucks or something like that. She’ll be around to help me for the rest of the two weeks. So it’ll be great.

WW: And when does all this start?

PH: Leave Friday at two in the afternoon.

WW: This Friday?

PH: Yeah.

WW: Fly direct?

PH: Direct from–well, New York-Tokyo–

WW: And then to Shanghai.

PH: One hour in Tokyo, and then to Shanghai. Twenty-six-hour journey.

WW: Since the day will be turned upside down anyway–

PH: Yeah, it’ll be fun. I’m trying to figure out what to take to read on the way.

WW: Something you can leave on the plane?

PH: Exactly.

WW: On the airplane, so that you don’t have to lug it around.

PH: Exactly.

WW: I haven’t had to ask you many questions; what should I ask you to talk about that you haven’t talked about?

PH: God, I don’t know. From my listening to my blathering on here, I don’t, I haven’t heard anything that’s very interesting. But let’s wait until I come back.

WW: I don’t think it’s uninteresting.

PH: Well, you’ll have to clean out–

WW: We’ll clean out–

PH: Let’s wait till I come back, and I’m sure there’ll be some wonderful stories.

WW: We’ll have another conversation.

–To be continued.