The Hudson and the Yangtze, Part II
A Conversation with Peter Hutton

In the last issue of HVRR we spoke with Peter Hutton, filmmaker, as he was about to leave for China. He had already made two important films about the Hudson River. The trip to China was to film the Yangtze as a counterpart to the Hudson, as he further explains in this conversation on his return.

WW: We want to hear about your trip to China, filming the Yangtze, but before we get started on the new film, tell us about Study of a River, Part I–that’s the film shot in black and white in winter–and about Time and Tide–that’s the film taken while you rode a tugboat on the river; it’s in both black and white and color, am I right?

PH: Yes.

WW: And portholes frame some of the scenes. Just to put the new film in sequence.

PH: Yeah, and we can talk a little bit about Henry Hudson. But, um about, well, we’ll go way back to when I moved up to this area. Oh God, I don’t like doing this, but anyway, we’ll stumble along.

WW: You moved to this area.

PH: Because when I was younger, when I was a young man, a student, I spent ten years working as a merchant seaman. I developed a great fondness for ships and the sea and the whole kind of visual world that unfolds. I’d been, I trained as a painter originally, and eventually moved to sculpture, and after that into filmmaking. I became quite fascinated by the idea of just using film as a way to kind of document great moments of things that I’d seen in my life. It was more as a way not to use film in a kind of a narrative way, but to use it as a kind of a visual notebook, diary without the intimacy, to keep a record of the sort of the visual–well my response to the world in a way. As a young man I traveled a lot, and to me one of the great things about traveling was that it exposed you to the sort of unfolding variation of the landscape of the world, which was phenomenally interesting and fascinating visually. And so I thought if I started making films of my life I could keep a record of these different experiences. And one of the ideas was, is always to try to put myself in a position where I could travel frequently and, you know, explore the world and keep this ongoing record. And a lot of it–I don’t know if I talked about this last time–but one of my first strong influences as a young artist was as a child my father who kept a photo album. Stop me if I . . . .

WW: I don’t think you’ve talked about this before.

PH: Okay. He had been a merchant Seaman when he was a young man and kept a very nice, just a sort of a record of snapshots. From India, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, the different places that he had traveled, as well as the ships and life on the ship. As a child one of my first kind of influences was looking at this book. Sitting for hours in the living room, sort of turning the pages and dwelling on these exotic images–like Angkor Wat, the Taj Mahal, and very interesting sort of atmospheres from all over the world. So, when I started making films I realized that I always was, I mean I was interested in taking film back to a very fundamental place. Because I started making films in the 60s when there was a lot of emphasis on this sort of artifice image. It was during the whole psychedelic influence on art and culture. I always had a desire to strip away a lot of that kind of, sort of the visual celebration and get it down to an essential quality, these images that I was making. And I thought, well, I’ll use black-and-white film as a way to locate these essential issues. For the most part since the late 60s I have been making records of travels, of cities I’ve lived in, landscapes and cityscapes I guess would be a good way to characterize these films: studies of landscapes and cityscapes. Using black and white boils it down to a very essential kind of language. I was often using a camera that had a spring mechanism. You wind it up and it will allow you to take a certain length of shot and then it stops and you have to wind it up again.

WW: Did it slow down when it gets to the end?

PH: No, no. I mean this was a, I mean the earlier cameras of course did that, and the exposure changed. And that was sort of interesting just as a kind of a visual transformation of something, to see it get lighter and lighter before it stopped, but, uh . . . the limitation of this wind was very interesting to me. When I started putting together one of my first films, I would put a pause of black leader in between each shot to separate the images, because I was really just capturing these different moments, and they often didn’t have a linkage, so I didn’t feel the need to work into a more traditional sort of montage notion of editing. So I separated everything with black leader.

And then some time ago I was looking at the film, one of the films, and I realized that this is interesting because the black leader was a kind of early reference to looking at the book–even the kind of quality of the early photo album my father kept. It was a black book, and it had black- and-white images in it. And I thought, well maybe what has really influenced me to design the work in this manner is that it goes back to this idea of looking at a book, studying an image, turning the page (that’s sort of the black leader) and then there’s another image, you look at that, and then you turn the page. So, I’ve developed a style that I think goes back to looking at a book. Because these were still photographs, my film work has very much a sort of a photographic quality. It’s more like trying, in some way, kind of, to seduce the viewer into looking at the image and watching it, rather than manipulating the viewer through the structure of the film. Trying to pull the viewer into the image the way you would stop and look at a photograph. So anyway, this is just a way you can sort of contextualize my approach to film. But more so was the idea of traveling.

Throughout the 70s, the early 70s, throughout the 60s and the 70s I worked on ships on and off for ten years, from roughly ’64 to ’74. And I used shipping as a way to pay for my schooling, and also to travel, and to expand my whole understanding of the world. It was hugely rewarding in many ways.

When I moved up to the Hudson River Valley, I became fascinated with looking at the Hudson River. It triggered this yearning to continue traveling. Of course by moving up here I sort of settled down and started a family, and really for the first time in my life put down roots, in the Hudson River Valley.

I saw the sea as a kind of escape, as a way to get back into the wonderful world of motion and movement, and I decided to start a body of work that was about the river–it was about ships, and it was about movement–to put together a series of films that dealt specifically with the Hudson. It sort of depicted the more intimate relationship that I was developing with the Hudson. Because here was this great visual phenomenon that was unfolding everyday not very far from where I lived. It was something that would feed me wonderful information, and because it was a river, it was always in transition. It was always changing. And then combined with the change in seasons, and the variation in weather and with light, I realized that this was a phenomenal resource to have access to. In the late 80s I started working on a study of the river, which is called Study of a River, Part I. It’s really a study of the Hudson during wintertime. And for about a year, maybe a year and a half, I just shot images of the river during the wintertime because it’s so interesting to look at the river from the shore in winter, particularly since there are small channels the Coast Guard would keep open with the icebreakers that would go up and down the Hudson. This is when the river got extremely cold. There were some winters when it didn’t freeze at all. There was one particular winter, I think it was in the early 90s, when it actually froze dramatically–it was fascinating to see ships from the shore traveling up and down the river. when it looked like there was no channel. You couldn’t really see the broken ice from the sight lines of the shore, unless you were high up. It looked like the ships were traveling on ice. It was a fascinating visual reference to the river itself, as well as these ships.

And one day I noticed, I was up in Germantown, that near the big cement silo, in North Germantown, there was a tug pulling a barge. Over the years I’ve been doing a lot of reading about the history of the river, and I was fascinated by the phenomenon in early colonial times that they would catch whales out in the Atlantic and bring them, actually tow them, up the Hudson, up to Hudson, New York, and process the whales for oil and also for bones–whatever they can recycle out of these huge whales. And I noticed–I was looking at a barge–and I thought well, this is interesting, because this a sort of bulbous, you know, rounded shaped, big black thing that this tug was towing, and I said well, it’s interesting because that barge is filled with heating oil and this is one of the common modes of transportation for heating oil. To drag a barge up to Albany, empty it, and bring it back. The whales became the barge. And I thought how little times had changed in a certain kind of interesting way. It really opened up a kind of a referencing to both the history of the river and the unfolding complexity of, how you could look at the river. It’s been a remarkable resource.

After completing this winter section (and during that time I rode on one of the Coast Guard icebreakers) I said to someone, well, it would be great to get on a ship in the wintertime. And they said, why don’t you call the Coast Guard. I said, well, they would never let someone like me get on a Coast Guard ship. They said you’d be surprised. There’s been some interesting news reports. But this was during the winter when it froze rather dramatically, I think it was ’92. So I called up the Coast Guard, and they referred me to a commander down at Governor’s Island off Manhattan, who I talked to. I explained my situation, that I was a professor at Bard College and that I was making a film on the Hudson, and would it at all be possible to ride on one of the icebreakers. He said, oh sure, he said the Sturgeon Bay is leaving Tuesday morning from Governor’s Island and we’re actually going to Kingston. You’re more than welcome to ride along with us.

Two days later I was on a train down to Manhattan. I spent the night and then went to Governor’s Island at 6 AM. They welcomed me on the ship and I rode it from Manhattan up to Kingston. While we were in the Kingston area we spent a couple of hours breaking up ice under the Rhinecliff-Kingston Bridge, which was quite interesting because one of the things they do is, not only keep the channel open in wintertime, but they also, this was late in the winter and so the ice was beginning to thaw and through the tidal flow of the river they were breaking up the larger chunks of ice just to ensure that it wouldn’t clog the . . .

WW: The channel.

PH: The channel. So this is quite interesting. And they were very, uh, they were so interested in what I was doing. They put me in something they called a "mustang suit," which is a kind of a survival suit, because I just brought a jacket and some gloves and a little fur hat. I thought I’d be fine, but it was quite cold. It was, you know, near zero the morning we went up. So they put me in this survival suit. Which was this phenomenal outfit that they said if I would have fallen overboard I would have been fine for twenty hours in this thing.

The trip up the Hudson that morning was one of the most remarkable journeys I’ve had. It was very common to see eagles, bald eagles on pieces of ice, particularly down in the Highland area by West Point, feeding on fish. A lot of things revealed themselves to me about the river, which I hadn’t experienced. And I should preface this by saying I’ve had a small boat for years and explored the river just in the summertime, mostly on my own. But this was quite extraordinary, going up during the wintertime. And seeing also the beauty of the ice and the contrast with the landscape. The obvious very black-and-white world that was unfolding before my eyes. So this was a beginning of a, of what I thought was going to be a continual study of the river that would be based on the seasons.

And then some years later I met a very delightful couple from Kingston, Gary Mathews and Annie Loding, who were restoring an old tugboat over in Kingston. I can’t remember the name of the boat,* but they had literally salvaged this old tug out of the bottom of the Roundout. It was under 50 feet of water–or 30 feet. It had gone down about, I think in the 70s, and Gary had researched the boat and found out there was really not a great deal wrong with it, but it had been a tug for a company that was defunct, and they just let it sit at a dock over there and then one morning it sank. So they brought a huge–the biggest dredging crane on the East Coast–from Connecticut, down the East Coast, up the Hudson River and to Kingston. They used this gigantic crane with divers and professional people to raise this little tug up. And they pumped it out and they realized what caused it to sink. It was just one little cock or valve had been left open and essentially it just flooded and went down. So now they’re still restoring the boat and it’s sitting over next to the Maritime Museum. It’s quite damaged, but it’s an old wooden, quite beautifully designed early tugboat. Gary’s an engineer by trade and he works on various shipping lines, shipping companies. The two of them have been making a living working for various companies. So I said, gee it would be great, I’ve been doing this film, what’s the possibility of me getting a ride up and down the river a few times with you guys? They talked to their company. They were more than happy to let me come along.

So, I started a second film, called Time and Tide, which is a study of the river, but from the point of view of riding on these tugboats and pulling barges. Pulling and pushing these barges up and down the Hudson. So this became the second leg of the study of the Hudson.

After that was finished, I thought it would be interesting to, um, do something quite different, and fortunately a woman contacted me from a foundation in New York called Minetta Brook; that’s the name of the foundation; her name is Diane Shamash. She called me on the phone and said I’ve heard you’ve been making films about the Hudson. She said, would it be possible for me and someone else to come up to Bard to look at them someday? Because, she said, I’ve been commissioning artists to do work on the Thames in London. She said, I’m starting a new series of commissions [for those] who do work on the Hudson and we’d like to see what you do.

So, I met with them and I showed them the films. And then she said–uh, initially there was no response; it was kind of a mysterious meeting–but about a month later she called me up and said, we’re very interested in your work. I would like to ask you to make a proposal to the foundation to do a third project on the Hudson. And they will, hopefully, support it.

So I started thinking about the history of the river and thus the totality of what the river represented. And then I was reading from a book, that I reference quite a bit, called Chronicles of the Hudson, which contains different writings by different people through the last several hundred years on the river itself. I was drawn to the diary that was kept by Robert Juet, who was the pilot for Henry Hudson when they sailed the Half Moon to New York in 1609. It’s a very interesting account of their voyage up the Hudson River at that time and, um, I then realized that, as were most of the navigators and explorers of that era, they were looking for this passage to go to China.

WW: Of course, the Northwest Passage.

PH: They were looking for the Northwest Passage because they thought if they went up to the Arctic area they could punch through the ice and get to the Orient that way. Certainly the allure of the Orient was sort of mythical for all these early explorers. And I realized that Henry Hudson was in fact looking for China when he discovered the Hudson River. He had in fact [first] gone North, as was the common direction, but his crew reacted to the severity of the climate in the north, up in the Arctic area, and threatened to mutiny, so to appease them he started going south. He went all the way down to the coast of Virginia, I think, and then not finding any great avenues into the continent of North America he continued back north again, and then they found the inlet to New York and the beginning of the Hudson River.

This idea sort of stuck in my head, that he was in fact dreaming of a Chinese landscape. So I thought, well, maybe I should go to China and I put together a proposal that is more, in some ways, a kind of a metaphoric journey, based on the idea that Henry Hudson was thinking about China. So, I made a proposal to the foundations to combine a study of the Yangtze, and other rivers in China, and to weave it together (in a more contemporary way, obviously) with this journey up the Hudson. That sort of symbolized his [Hudson’s] initial foray up the river. To make a statement about traveling and about exploring these different landscapes and to weave together the two rivers.

So, last summer I went to China and began a record of, of traveling down the Yangtze for two and a half weeks, which has now been done.

The interesting thing is that in my further research about Hudson, when he finished his third voyage, which was, of course, when he discovered the river, he went back to Europe–and of course he had been working for the Dutch East India Company–and then [he] was commissioned by a group of English merchants to do a fourth voyage, which he was eager to do. So he set up another ship–whose name I don’t know, but I’m in the process of researching–and again proceeded to head north up past Spitzbergen, or Norway, and into the Arctic region. On the fourth voyage a similar thing happened. His crew threatened mutiny, and this time they actually mutinied. And they were so exasperated by his relentless need to sort of persevere through this Arctic landscape that they put him and his son in a small boat and cast them off. And that was the end of Henry Hudson’s life.

And so I thought it would be fitting to tack on a sequence to this project where I’m either going to Newfoundland or Iceland next summer to do a little, sort of portrait of this frozen northern landscape, maybe it’s icebergs. I’m not sure at this point, but to do a little homage to Hudson’s fourth voyage. But anyway we want to talk about the visual significance.

WW: Well, in Study of a River, Part I, the frame is steady, stationary . . .

PH: Mm-hmm.

WW: . . . and behind it, or through it, the images were moving or the light was changing, or . . .

PH: Mm-hmm.

WW: The frame was very definitely rectangular . . . And it wasn’t as though the camera was doing the looking, anticipating where to look next.

PH: Yeah, that’s right.

WW: And so in Time and Tide, which I have not seen . . .

PH: Oh, you still haven’t seen it–I should get you to see it.

WW: . . . but have heard a lot about, there is the interesting idea, at least for part of it, that the frame is no longer a rectangle, but a round.

PH: Well, yeah, this is simply a kind of a way to visually kind of contextualize the landscape as well as [to establish] the viewpoint from a ship, through a porthole. Of course on tugboats there are other windows up in the wheelhouse that aren’t circular, yet the common signature of a lot of ships are the portholes. I’ve always been fascinated with . . .

Telephone rings [. . . . ]

WW: Now, where were we?

PH: Well, we were talking about the porthole thing, so we’ll continue with that. It’s just that ships afford such wonderfully different points of view. As a filmmaker you’re always looking for a different way to see the world. And to communicate part of the character of ships, portholes became a very interesting, a sort of troche for me. Also, one of the things I like to do with film, and have tried to do over the years, is to take away a lot of the time reference–a contemporary sense of time–and to try to suspend the viewer a little bit in a sort of mystery about when was this film was made–where are we? To try to reference an idea of timelessness, and certainly the porthole takes you back in time because it references a nineteenth-century idea. So I became fascinated with using the porthole as a kind of metaphor [so it would] become this sort of looking glass, a telescope lens, an extension of the things I’m dependent on as a filmmaker. And I used it quite a bit in Time and Tide.

I should say the film opens, Time and Tide opens with a film that was made by the Biograph Company in 1903, and it was shot by Billy Bitzer . . .

WW: I remember.

PH: . . . who was an early cameraman for D.W. Griffith. At that time, he did a lot of short, one-wheelers, for Biograph, that they turned into Mutascopes, which were rotating spindles with photographs on them. You would stand and look at this little window. It suggested the moving image, and it was a precedent to moving images. He made this little film called Down the Hudson. And I called Scott MacDonald, who teaches at Bard in the film-history program. He had mentioned this film, and [he] showed me a very beautiful series, I think six films most of which were done by Edison, but it included some of the early Mutascopes that were turned into films at that time by the Biograph Company. And they’re all sort of regional portraits of things in the Hudson River Valley. A number of films that take place in the valley, but also an extraordinary piece on Niagara Falls that was done, I think, in 1904. Sort of New York State, it’s like early examples of films as a kind of recording of the landscape. They’re very ghostly, sort of faded films in themselves. And that’s interesting too, because one of the things that preceded all this film work was the Hudson River School of painters with these spectacularly colored, finely rendered things and then we jump into this very shadowy, faint early realization of cinema.

WW: Those Hudson River painters were also working with light.

PH: Oh yes, very much so, and they certainly provided me with a great kind of referencing. Time and Tide is half color and half black and white, but it was really the first time I brought color into it, and I think for the most part it was a way to reference the exquisite color of the Hudson River School, and to try to begin to play off this new kind of palette of the Hudson River.

The film opens with a short film, and the Library of Congress has a collection of what are called paper negatives. In the early days when you made films you had to submit a record of the film to the Library of Congress. They made paper duplicates of all the films, so now you can call the librarian at the Library of Congress who’s in charge of the film program and ask for a print, a reprint of the paper negative. What you get is a black-and-white, also very faded, but interesting copy of these original films. And of course they’re in the public domain.

I tagged on the front of my film this early Bitzer piece. It’s fascinating because he actually made the film a frame at a time. It’s a single-frame depiction of going down the Hudson, roughly from Newburgh down to Haverstraw. It’s single frame, so it creates a sort of time-lapse phenomenon. The boat is–he’s on the front of a steamboat and it’s literally flying down the river and zigzagging [to show] the shore of the Hudson. You can see steam locomotives. On the river you see other steamboats jogging back and forth. It’s really a wonderful, sort of hyperkinetic portrait of the turn-of-the-century Hudson.

And then my film starts in this incredibly slow, almost dreamlike quality. The opening shot of what follows the early Bitzer clip is a shot that I did in a tugboat a few years ago, which was also [moving] through the ice. So it goes from this very fast, hyperkinetic sense of time, to this very slow, dreamy shot of the ship breaking through the ice, somewhere up near Albany, in black and white. It’s quite a nice contrast. The velocity of the old and then the much more sluggish velocity of now. It sets up a wonderful contrast. But in doing research I kept on looking at this little clip, this Bitzer clip titled "Down the Hudson," over and over again, and I thought, well, there’s a problem: it’s not actually going down the Hudson, it’s going up the Hudson. Then I thought maybe they flipped the negative so it looks backward, but I couldn’t quite justify the topography as it unfolded because having taken a dozen trips up and down the Hudson I realized . . .

WW: You recognized where you were.

PH: . . . I realized that it’s actually going up the Hudson. And the way I figured it out was by looking at the church steeples. I thought if there’s one part of the landscape that’s going to stay consistent with the turn-of-the-century landscape it’s churches. Everything else has probably gone through considerable changes, but not in all cases. I realized that the steeples in Newburgh were the ones that the film ended in. Anyway, we straightened that out.

The film is a chronicle of pushing barges, mostly fuel barges. There’s a beautiful old barge called the Noel Cutler that this company that I was riding with owned, well they would actually lease the barge. It was filled with gasoline, on two or three occasions that I rode on it, that was being pushed up to Albany, to an Agway depot just south of Albany. It was fascinating being on a ship that was pushing this barge filled with gasoline. You begin to appreciate that this is very common, an everyday activity on the river, when you consider how difficult it is navigating with a barge full of fuel oil and gasoline, with the tidal shifts and the currents of the Hudson. I gained a great deal of respect and appreciation for these captains, and the skippers, and the people that work on these boats because of the potential danger of running aground.

It was the occasion that one winter, two or three years ago, I was on the same tugboat with the same barge; we’d emptied it. This was in January, so it was a cold winter trip. We were coming back from Albany. We ran aground in the channel right off of the, just off of Germantown, I believe, but it could have been a little bit more north of there. The channel in many cases is only twenty feet wide and in the wintertime they take down the uh, the more permanent, or the traditional buoys, the bell buoys. They’re prone to move under the pressure of the ice and they supplement them with these smaller can buoys that are made out of plastic. They are more resilient, but they’re harder to see at night. One of the jobs of the person in the wheelhouse at night in the Hudson is panning this searchlight that is very bright back and forth across the ice–this is on very cold nights, so the channel itself has almost refrozen–to locate these buoys to make sure they were in fact in the channel.

WW: Yes.

PH: And here’s this, really, what appears to most people to be this entire frozen horizon. It’s very hard at night to distinguish where the broken ice is and where the frozen ice is. So at one point we missed a buoy. I was sleeping in this little tiny fo’c’sle, and all of a sudden the whole tugboat shifted about thirty degrees, and I almost rolled out of the bunk. And the sound was of plates crashing in the galley, smashing against the tile floor. And I thought a tug is one of the safest kinds of vessels you can imagine. They’re just so . . .

WW: Solid.

PH: . . . solid and powerful. It was like in a dream where the gravity shifted, and I was, you know, rolling out of my bunk. So I got dressed and ran out on the deck, and of course it was about twenty below zero. And the crew that consisted of just four people. The engineer, my friend Gary, was out on deck. They were trying to discern what they could do to get off the side of this channel. We were stuck there for about six hours, and our first task was to pump water out of the forward bilge on the tug to try to . . .

WW: Lighten it.

PH: . . . lighten it up a little bit, but the little valve for the bilge was frozen, it was covered with ice as was most of the deck. So we got hammers and chisels and we were banging away at this frozen steel ship. It was quite amazing, but the captain, a very calm and able seaman, proceeded, and the barge was light, thank God, because if the barge would have been full it would have been, it could have been, a disaster, meaning the contents could have spilled out, or [the barge] could have split even, depending on the nature of the channel edge.

WW: Was the barge on the ledge too?

PH: The barge was actually strapped to the side of the tug on the way back. We didn’t tow it back. They actually, they sort of harnessed it next to the tug. And this is in some ways [the] preferable [way] to transport empty barges. They’re less kind of vulnerable to drift. But anyway, essentially he just drove the tug for a few hours, slowly backward and forward, like a car that gets stuck in the mud. You sort of eventually work your way out by backing up and going forward and backing up and going forward.

WW: And the tide is coming in perhaps?

PH: The tide, we determined, was coming in, and I think that worked in our advantage obviously. But this was a very frightening moment for the whole crew because this was quite unusual.

[ . . . . ]

PH: In May of this year I went to China. I flew to Shanghai, and then went with a very nice Chinese woman named Ming Xia Li. She had been accustomed to taking people to China. She grew up in the Beijing area and never really had done the south half of China. So she offered her services. I obviously needed someone to act as a translator and to help facilitate this journey, because, even though China is hugely accessible to tourism and tourism is a hugely burgeoning industry in China, it’s still awkward to make your way in China without having some language skills, which I, of course, didn’t have.

So, Mingxia and I flew from Shanghai to Chongqing, which is, I don’t know, about a third of the way down the Yangtze from the west. It’s really one of the first major cities going from west to east on the Yangtze. We stayed there for a few days and kind of got a sense of our relationship with China and the landscape, and did a little tourist stuff in Chongqing. We went to some beautiful Buddhist caves that had been saved from the Cultural Revolution, not entirely undamaged, but, for the most part, intact. And began to sort of process. One of the great difficulties when you go to a new culture as ancient and as rich as the Chinese landscape, is just how overwhelmed you become by the history, just by the humanity–there’re millions of stories before your eyes all the time so it’s bewildering.

But I had to focus entirely on the river. And I thought, well my objective is to make sort of a documentation of the Yangtze. Particularly in the context of the fact that it’s going through this massive transformation–most people are well aware of this–the Chinese have built this huge dam on the Yangtze, below the Three Gorges, which is one of the most celebrated regions of the Yangtze because of the absolutely remarkable geographic significance of the landscape. They’re in the process of relocating I think hundreds of towns and thousands of villages, and some major cities along the Yangtze, because in building this dam they’re going to flood the river. I should have brought some of my facts and figures, because I do have a little record of the more specific characteristics of what this flood is going to do to this landscape. Essentially they’re flooding this region of the Yangtze and it’s going to forever change.

Given the rich history, I mean the Yangtze has been a vital water highway for Chinese culture for centuries, the fact that it’s going through this huge transformation–it’s never going to be what it was, and the landscape itself is going to change significantly. I mean if we think of the Hudson River, if we flooded the area of the Highlands, West Point would be under water. We always look at West Point up on these granite cliffs overlooking the Hudson, that fortress of a location, and to imagine that submerged you begin to get an idea of the tremendous transformation the Yangtze is going to undergo. So I thought it would be interesting as kind of a subtext to make a record of the Yangtze at this time to show this amazing landscape from a historical point view. And also to look at it, going back to my original premise, which was to make a film about a kind of a metaphoric idea of what is a river.

It’s hard to find really direct relationships between the Yangtze and the Hudson, because they’re two really different parts of the world, and geologically two hugely diverse configurations. But there are relationships that you can find. I mean both rivers historically are very practical highways of commerce. I think the whole history of the Yangtze bears this out, the main source of transportation for goods and for people as well. So there’s a very practical utility to rivers. Also there’s the other idea that rivers afford people a way to see the landscape in a different way through movement and the passage of time and space. It reveals the landscape and often in the case of both rivers in an inspiring manner. Certainly the Hudson River School recorded very many moments on the river. And in the history of Chinese painting the Yangtze, of course, was a huge source of inspiration.

So there’s sort of a dual practical function, the utility of the commerce and then the subsequent industry along the river, and the inspirational aspects of nature and of the kind of cultural applications a river affords people. I mean if you think of the idea that because of the shipping on a river change is inevitable, and change is always coming to places. It keeps these communities in sort of a fluid cultural relationship to the rest of the world, which is interesting because new things are always coming to it, hastening some kind of cultural and sociological transformation as well.

This is something that I think a lot about, and of course that helped me to understand both landscapes. But essentially, the Chinese, the Yangtze, is such a, a kind of, I mean one of the first impressions is just the overwhelming number of people who use the Yangtze for traveling. We traveled primarily on commercial passenger boats, all of which were Chinese. One of the things that you’re absolutely amazed at is the variety of different modes of transportation on a river like the Yangtze, from the very small, sort of intimate sampans and fishing boats that the local people use to the variety of different ships you’ll find. You can’t help but appreciate the loss that the Hudson experienced with as the development of railroad transportation on both sides of the river, so that the river is deprived of all of these other sort of more practical conveyances. I think all of us know that if you look at the Hudson you’ll see of course people and small boats enjoying the river. It’s sort of a recreational culture on the river. And then the utility, the barges and the tugboats and what not. But there are very few passenger boats. And the fact is that the river provides us with, potentially. a great relationship to the landscape, as well as insight into the beauty of the movement and the transitional aspects of nature. It’s kind of a tragedy that we’ve deprived ourselves of these more public kinds of conveyances on the Hudson.

WW: The overnight boats from New York to Albany so very long ago.

PH: Yeah, I mean I think if people had access to river travel, it would be a revelation. I know they used to have the Hudson River Day Line that would go from Manhattan to West Point. I think they’ve even discontinued that, which was a very common way that a whole generation of New Yorkers got to enjoy the Hudson River Valley.

It’s great on the Yangtze because people travel up and down the Yangtze on public passenger boats. There’s such a diversity of different kinds of boats. You can get the very luxurious ones that have air-conditioned rooms and, you know, first-class amenities. There are European companies that run these very exclusive boats that are for western travelers who really don’t want to get down into the, the humanity of China, yet also do see and appreciate this landscape. So, it was fascinating just looking at the variety of ships on the Yangtze, but also seeing the development of the landscape and the transition of the landscape, from intensely industrial regions to absolutely inspirational. The beauty of the geography at different points, particularly through the Three Gorges, is just remarkable; from the top of the mountain into the river itself. This to me was the most rewarding part of making this record. It would be almost as if you could take a boat through the Grand Canyon and make a record of that, the landscape revealed itself in such a spectacular way. To a large extent it was imbued by being halfway around to the other side of the world, and being in this incredibly exotic culture was very much a revelation to be looking at the landscape at a time when it was going through such a transformation.

One of my original ideas, despite the very loosely conceptualized project, is also that on the Hudson we’re on the cusp of this process of cleaning up the Hudson–hopefully if it goes through–because of the PCBs. I thought this would be an interesting comparison, the dam on the Yangtze and the dredging of the Hudson, these two major contemporary undertakings that will forever change our perception of these two rivers. Whether that will play out in my continued study of the Hudson part of the project, I’m not sure, because already I’m hearing that there are delays. I mean even though the EPA has ruled that GE should proceed with funding the dredging of the PCB’s, it’s [still an unsettled] issue that I think is in the minds of many people, particularly those upriver. It’s very complicated, and logistically they don’t have any kind of understanding of what actually this will entail.

On the other hand the [dam on the] Yangtze seems to be proceeding. Ming Xia called the other day and passed on a message that some of the towns along the Yangtze are in fact being abandoned right now. We could see that some of the larger towns, looking at them from the river, were in this sort of transitional mode. And you can see up on the mountains, above the cities, they’ve rebuilt entire replicas . . .

WW: Replicas?

PH: . . . well not exactly replicas, newer cities that many of the people will move to. One of the traumas of the transformation of the Chinese landscape is that a lot of the people who have lived along the Yangtze for centuries are actually being relocated to other parts of China, so they’re being deprived of their traditional source of livelihood.

WW: River life.

PH: River life, familiarity with that whole culture is being, they’re being displaced. The idea of the dam is hugely traumatic to the, I think, the Chinese people. We would talk informally with people up and down the river.

The section of the Yangtze that I documented was really just about one-third of the total length. It is one of the, I think the third longest river in the world. It was impossible under those circumstances to do the entire river, yet I did the most geographically and distinctive part of the river, the Three Gorges.

WW: Further down, let’s say, where the Yangtze comes to the flats? Is that at all like the lower regions of the Hudson?

PH: I think it is. I mean it shares kind of, even though with the Palisades, and sort of the drama of that landscape kind of cutting into the Hudson down there. It’s more characteristic of, more like the Mississippi where it’s going through a relatively flat landscape. The Yangtze moves to the east, eventually Shanghai, [and empties] into the South China Sea. The landscape flattens out, and this is their, their kind of "breadbasket" region. Where all the rice comes from, and whatever, but it’s a more deltaesque kind of landscape. Whereas the drama of the Three Gorges is that it’s hugely mountainous and geographically dynamic.

. I also spent, took a trip down the Lijiang River, which goes between Guilin, which is in the south, more to the southwest, completely different river, but also a hugely inspirational river for Chinese art. The landscape is more the sort of the steep rolling mountains that are more characteristic of Vietnam and that corner of China. Ah, this was absolutely the most beautiful river. One of the aspects of the Yangtze is that it’s hard to accept, but you understand it, it’s brutal–it’s like the industry and the river are very closely related. It’s much like my childhood memory of the relationship between the Detroit River and its industry, and other rivers in the Midwest, where I grew up, where industry was very much a part of those river cultures. And the river became a kind of a great receptacle for the waste, as well as [its use for] the commerce the industry yielded.

WW: And the Hudson?

PH: The Hudson, we’ve gotten away from that aspect of the river culture because most of the traditional industries along the Hudson have disappeared. This is one of the more shocking things, and when you get on the Yangtze you see that the industries are still very robust, they’re still very much in a kind of 50s mode. Meaning [there are] no controls on the pollution. Just the kinds of industrial nature of these river industries are so environmentally out of control that you are shocked. The Yangtze, at one time, was a very fertile and much more diverse ecological system. It’s been severely poisoned by the industry along the river, as much as our rivers were in the 50s. It’s the price China is now having to pay for this productivity and this development and the consequences to the environment. Hopefully they will be able to overcome the [problem] the way that we were, with time.

WW: Much of this polluting industry will be flooded out.

PH: Yeah, I mean this is one of the great [contradictions] despite all the tragedies you read about, about the human displacement, a lot of the environmentalists are elated over the fact that these horrible cement factories, and vast, vast, vast industrial complexes that are fueled with coal and are hugely toxic, will be submerged under the river. And then you begin to think, well, wait a minute, there’s talk of dynamiting a lot of the cities along the river, as well as the industry, to further dissipate it before the river envelops it. And then you start thinking about all . . .

WW: What will become of all the rubble?

PH: All the materials in the mix of debris and everything.

WW: Washing up in the delta.

PH: It suggests a completely different ecological, sort of nightmare.

It’s fascinating too to observe these two parallel landscapes. To think of both, in relationship to a kind of a greater human awareness of how to harmonize industry with society. It’s an ongoing problem that every culture obviously has to deal with.

WW: I think now the industry on the Hudson is comparatively benign.

PH: Yeah.

WW: I have seen midwestern rivers; the river in Pittsburgh is never quite clean.

PH: Yeah, and in Cleveland, the, I can’t remember the name of it. When I was, when I first started working on the Great Lakes on the iron-ore boats we used to go to Cleveland often and pick up coal that we would take up to Detroit. And some of the rivers in Cleveland at that time, in the 60s, the early 60s, were toxic. I mean they were, you know, you couldn’t throw a match in, they were so laden with oil and fuel deposits and residue from the industry in Cleveland that they were . . . . One river, the, I can’t remember the name of it, it did catch fire periodically.

WW: I am thinking of some of the shots you brought back, that you printed in sepia. Now when I think of the Yangtze, I think of sepia as its natural color.

PH: One of my aesthetic strategies, or ideas, was to, I filmed the Yangtze both in black and white and in color, but I spent a lot of preparation for the trip looking at Chinese landscape painting, trying to inspire myself with some historical reference to the landscape. The quality of the paintings, the sort of brown, black ink on brown paper or on mostly faded silk material, does have a kind of sepia quality. So I shot half in black and white, and then printed on color stock so it took on a kind of a sepia quality. The other thing is that actually where you go through some of the more industrial regions of the Wushan–I should be specific; I should have brought my river book and talked about between Chongqing and Yichang, for example, where the industry is very concentrated–the atmosphere is almost bleached of color. Despite the fact that the film looks as if it kind of tweaked off into a kind of sepia palette, in reality there wasn’t much color to behold along patches of the river. It’s like the industry sucked all the color out of the landscape. You would see patches of green occasionally, and in a very rare instance you would see blue sky, but often it was a kind of gaseous atmosphere that didn’t allow you to see clearly what the landscape looked like.

I know from having been in the Hudson River Valley for 15, 16 years, there are days in the summer when you look out at the river you can’t see the Catskills because they’re enveloped in a very smoggy atmosphere. These are things that are comparable in certain ways. How the environment influences our perception of the landscape. This is obviously going to be woven into the film itself. I mean, part of the idea of evoking a kind of more mysterious idea, maybe a more metaphoric idea of the river, is, "Where are we here? Is this New York? Is this China?" As if you would think of Hudson’s fantasy of finding China as he’s going up the Hudson, trying to imagine this other landscape. It gives me a kind of freedom to weave more effectively together these two landscapes. And to make notes, comparing the functional and the inspirational realities of these two tremendous rivers.

WW: And then you won’t use a different stock, or way of printing it, for the parts about the Hudson?

PH: No, I don’t, it’s an interesting idea, but it’s great to avail yourself artistically of different palettes. I think I’ll continue to work in both black and white and in color. It’s more in some way to lull people into a certain sense of reality and then to take it away from them, and then see if you can’t sort of suggest another way to look at something. The kinds of films that I make are very dependent on their look. It’s not so much feeding people an overt kind of information, as to trigger a kind of an interpretation the way painting does and the way even music can do. It’s not to make so much a literal record of things as to suggest a different point of departure and, hopefully, a kind of transcendent idea behind landscape.

[ . . . . ]

PH: Taking away the sound is another way to making people commit more to the actual study of the image. Of course it doesn’t always work that way, but it is, I think, in my relationship to filmmaking, there is a need to remind people that a great deal of satisfaction can be derived from just looking at things, without this sort of layering of information. Sound, despite it’s richness and creative tradition in cinema also becomes, it often gives films a certain kind of velocity, an informational kind of a velocity, that really carries along the image. I want to try to suspend that, so people can see again.

I’m trying to kind of conceptualize–now how will I present this? Is it one film? Is it two films? Is it two films double projected? I’ve been experimenting with different approaches. One thing that I’m pretty certain is that it would be a great way to see this film when it’s finished is actually to get on a boat and to watch the film as you’re moving down the river at nighttime. And then the sound of the boat itself would be actually the soundtrack, which was in fact the real soundtrack of the film. As I was filming it was kind of brr . . . brrr . . . brrr.

It’s a great project. I mean it’s something that’s been great for me because of my love of the river and also my love of traveling. It kind of enabled me to weave together these two.

WW: Will you be taking new shots of the Hudson?

PH: I’m already starting to work on the new section of the Hudson River. And going back to my great friend Gary, he’s restored an old steam launch over in Kingston, and he’s now researching the proper kind of coal to use in the steam launch; because you need the exact kind of coal that will enable it to run efficiently.

WW: Without it blowing up?

PH: Without belching out huge amounts of smoke. I talked to him last week. He’s down in Pennsylvania where they have a great steam-locomotive museum.

WW: Railroad?

PH: A railroad museum. I can’t remember the town that it’s in. There’s a whole culture of steam-engine devotees down there who work on these old steam locomotives, and he’s down there talking to them about what might be appropriate for this small steam launch. He literally has to buy tons of this coal and somehow transport it up the Hudson. In his own world he’s so fascinated by the culture of the river–I should say he’s a great, one of the best students of the Hudson of anybody I’ve met. We’d be going down the river on a tug, and he would see just the silhouette of another tug, like almost away beyond, you know, your visual reach, he’d see a little smokestack and he’d say, oh, that’s the Mary Beth Jones, made in 1937; he’d have all the characteristics. He could identify almost all the tugs we would see and tell me when they were made and what kind of engine they had. and he himself personally is a great, he’s interested in steam engines. He and his friend, Annie, took a trip to China ten years ago to study steam locomotives, because China, still to this day, has one of the greatest collections of steam locomotives, and railroad engines in the world. So he took a trip ten years ago, also with a movie camera to make little films of these steam locomotives. It’s wonderful stuff to see, you’d never imagine that it was done in the Eighties.

So, Gary has promised me once he gets the steamboat that we’ll take some forays out into the Hudson. Often early in the morning I have this vision of sort of relating more to the atmosphere. In the proposal I submitted to this foundation I talked a lot about Turner, the English painter, and his relationship between industry and atmosphere and the event, a kind of visual collision between these two entities. One of the most beautiful atmospheric conditions on the Hudson is when the fog or mist collects just over the river itself. The sailors call this "sea smoke." It can create these extraordinary plumes of white smoke. Gary told me that autumn is really the best season for this, so one of my first objectives [is to film it]. Also I’m filming, there is a huge gravel quarry south of Poughkeepsie, that we see on the train often, with huge silos and gargantuan piles of gravel. I’m going down there to do filming.

I mean the interesting thing that you observe on both rivers, the Yangtze and the Hudson, is the fact that the earth itself, the landscape itself, becomes the product of a great deal of the commerce. Certainly in the Hudson River, the bricks and cement have been the primary kind of commerce, and it’s true of the Yangtze as well. So, it’s interesting to visually study the workings of these kinds of industries as well.

One of the more interesting observations, kind of continually looking at the Chinese footage over and over and over again, to me it looks like a kind of body, an old bony body on the landscape.

WW: As the piles of bricks dumped by barges all along the shore.

PH: Yes. And there are the geologic implications of this, parts of it are sort of carved out, you can see caves in different parts. I took a trip up through an area called the Little Gorges, which is a tributary off the Yangtze, and it’s an absolutely remarkable landscape. You start seeing how the land has been carved away by time and water and the greater sort of geologic transformation of the landscape. I was struck with the impression that it does, in many ways, look like a body. It’s like parts of a body. This is something I can’t quite get it out of my mind. I don’t know quite where I’m going with it. And my wife mentioned that the Native Americans think of the earth as the mother, this great body that provides.

[ . . . . ]

WW: You do know that the Hudson River’s course changed. It used to go out by Paterson, New Jersey.

PH: Yeah, I read that. I read that actually just recently.

WW: Somewhere I have a map of the old river.

PH: That’s fascinating. It’s a great source of reflection, and for an artist it’s because it’s always in transformation; it’s fascinating to watch it evolve. The interjection of the different seasons on the landscape and the transformative qualities that just winter and snow bring to the landscape.

WW: The year, like the river, is liquid, so to speak.

PH: Yeah, it’s just amazing.

WW: The water is liquid, the air is liquid, the light is liquid.

PH: I was in Rotterdam last year and I did a little research on some of the early records. Hudson kept a diary that is for the most part lost. And there’s a Dutch–I might have mentioned this before, I don’t know–a Dutch nautical society that has put together some of the excerpts of Hudson’s, of his original diary. I believe it’s in Hudson’s diary or in Juet’s diary–I found reprints of it in the Maritime Museum in Rotterdam, which is a great, great Maritime Museum, spectacular, one of the best I’ve seen in the world. I go to these museums all over the world, too, because they tend to be really insightful in terms of the history of the culture, in particular the Dutch so, it was very important to the development of the Dutch cultures, this exploration. One of the first impressions Hudson’s crew had sailing up the Hudson was just the smells of all the fruit trees and the aromas of the plants, and certainly the river at that time was a cornucopia of seafood. And they could scoop out mussels and oysters. But it was the smells, the air, the atmosphere, the rich land, and in some ways they thought they’d come to heaven, because coming from Holland, which was sort of a flat land, devoid of a lot of vegetation, this was like a big deal. So, I did a shot a couple of weeks ago where I went out and I filmed these meadows around the orchards down near the, I mean the Hardemans, the orchard going into Red Hook. And then also near Barrytown, just some of these old meadows. The wind is blowing the plants. On Friday I’m taking a class out on the Rip Van Winkle, which is a kind of tourist boat that runs out of the Rondout. I’m superimposing these flowing meadows and orchards over the river itself to create a kind of a layering of this impression that I gleaned from these early records. It’s absolutely fun to weave the historical information into this observation and to see what you come up with.

WW: The metaphor, the prairie as an ocean.

PH: I always read history, I don’t know why because I’m not doing a historical documentary, but history gives me, it feeds me ideas as to how to interpret things. And that’s good I think.

WW: And after this the Amazon?

PH: Yeah. [both laugh] Boy. I don’t know.