Budapest Portrait (Memories of a City) (1986) by Peter Hutton

“Hutton is a flâneur, a walker in the city. Whereas his contemporary Ernie Gehr typically portrays the street as the site of past and present energies, and other filmmakers focus on the human fauna of the urban scene, Hutton evokes the solitary epiphanies of the metropolitan explorer. […] Budapest Portrait may be his strongest essay yet on the naturalization of the urban landscape. For Hutton, the city is less a social matrix than a verdant asphalt jungle. Close-up portraits of two ancient rag-pickers and a succession of elderly peasant women aside, virtually every other person shown is dominated by the surroundings. Human presence is often suggested merely by indexical signs—photographs, shadows or bullet holes. This relative absence of the figure, together with the harsh chiaroscuro of the winter light, induces a poignant sense of loneliness and isolation. Voluptuously gray, worn and lived in, the city is like a stage set for an invisible drama.” (J. Hoberman: “Peter Hutton: A Tale of Two Cities. Artforum)

The Sleepers (1999) by Amie Siegel

“Shot entirely at night in Siegel’s native Chicago, The Sleepers captures fleeting and obscure moments in the lives of strangers, glimpsed at a distance through the windows of neighboring apartment buildings. While watching the mysterious activity of the anonymous urbanites, a free-association Rear Window is released in the mind of the viewer who has been trained by the cinema to search for intrigue at the furthest edges of the frame.” (Harvard Film Archive)

“[…] The Sleepers is perhaps more connected to [Alfred Hitchcock’s] Vertigo (1958), in which Jimmy Stewart’s character—and the film’s audience—quietly observes Kim Novak for the first third of the movie without understanding what she’s doing; but both Hitchcock films link cinema to the interpretive impulse of imagination. Growing up, I was fascinated by voyeurism. Whether at home, in a ’70s-designed house with large internal windows […] or visiting friends’ high-rise apartments and looking into other buildings, I was already aware of the combination of proximity and distance that connects the watcher and the watched. The Sleepers starts out in a seemingly distanced observational mode, accumulating views of apartments across the way. Its montage is both sequential and simultaneous: shots of individual apartments, seen one after the other, are mixed with wider shots of two or more apartments at a time. But gradually clues emerge to contradict the film’s seeming objectivity…. (Amie Siegel interviewed by Steel Stillman, Art in America)