Boston Fire is a film for people who love the idea of film itself. All of Peter’s shots are static, braced against a merciless and powerful world, and somehow in the stillness the film metastasizes a curiously engaging realization about how we look at the world. (No one looks at the world like Peter. No one.) All of the frailty of the grain can be seen and cherished, the flicker sanctified, subjected to the amazing images he has captured. Peter converts the frightening simplicity and violence of the fire’s destruction into pure aesthetic pleasure — and it is this conversion that isolates Peter as such a true artist.

But what really cements his work as idiomatic is that they are all left completely silent.

He’s been quoted as saying that what interests him is the area between asleep and awake; that peculiar, unrecognizable place that lets you see things in such a unique way. Dozing off in one of his films is fine, because the experience of engagement with the work is what matters–however it unfolds.


His most recent film, At Sea, is an hour-long silent film comprised entirely of boats.  Yet, after it’s over, you cannot help but feel moved by his images. It reminds me of J.M.W. Turner’s best work — the stuff that he made when he stopped caring. Through the brush strokes, the places where the canvas can still be seen, and the sloppy paint work, remains the powerful qualities of his work. Peter channels Turner’s ability to convert an ordinary landscape into a view of extraordinary truth.