All posts by Phil Hoffman

Film Farm Brasil 2023: Phytogram by Moira Lacowicz

Moira at Film Farm Brasil
`Colt' `Deep 1′ (Frame Enlargement)

Flower Power & the Language of Animals @ Strangloscope  here

Hoffman & artist Tetsuya Maruyama @ Strangloscope
The Dynamite Duo Claudiá & Rafael
Sao Paulo Lab 2023 with Rodrigo Sousa

Rivers of Time: Films by Hoffman @ Strangloscope here

`river’ (Frame Enlargement) underwater Saugeen River 1989
Marcel Beltran & Philip Hoffman at Brasil Film Beach Farm Performance, Strangloscope Fest

*Hoffman Brasil 2023 Tour assisted  by the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Media Arts Travel Grant Program

Film Farm Collective visits Analogue Farm in U.K. (2019)

Film Farm at Analogue Farm’s 1st Public Screening in Manchester UK.

Vulture Aesthetics  by Hoffman here

`vulture’ (film processed with oregano)

Jordan Cronk on “Vulture”

Jordan Cronk, Off the Grid  (on Hoffman’s vulture)  Cinemascope 2020, MDFF Selects, TIFF Bell Light Box: …Nature plays a different but equally ominous role in vulture, an unassuming yet sublime featurette by veteran Canadian filmmaker Philip Hoffman. Assembled by the director over a period of two years, the film comprises 16mm footage shot on Hoffman’s farm in Mount Forest, Ontario that the filmmaker then photochemically processed with natural plant and flower pigments, resulting in a roughhewn, multivalent display of richly tinted and textured celluloid. To hear Hoffman tell it, his analog approach to cinema is part and parcel of a universal cycle of survival and sustainability; like a vulture, his film feasts on the very elements of its production, finding aesthetic nutrients in its every ingredient.

Following a brief shot of Homer Watson’s turn-of-the-20th-century landscape painting The Flood Gate, the film commences with a procession of slow, Wavelength-esque zooms towards a variety of animal life (pigs, horses, cows, goats, chickens) before shifting focus to take in the larger ecosystem surrounding the farm fauna: overhead, birds of prey patiently circle, while in the distance, tractors plow the land and farmers work the fields. The film’s landscape imagery occasionally recalls Nicolas Rey’s autrement, la Molussie (2012) or the work of the late Peter Hutton, though the quietly swelling audio frequencies—the sound is credited to Luca Santilli and Clint Enns, with a mix by experimental filmmaker Isiah Medina (88:88)—portend something far less comforting. Like Wilcox, vulture forgoes direct sound; instead, the distant din of fluttering distortion echoes across the stereo field like helicopter blades on the horizon, with the occasional sample of a young boy’s voice emerging from the void as if summoned from another dimension. Before long, those unassuming establishing shots (which appear mostly untouched by any post-production techniques) give way to a series of colour montages that cut together heavily treated images of plant, animal, and human life from around the farm—an idyllic vision disrupted by the subliminal threat of violence and industrialization. Rather than let the threat loom, Hoffman reworks a selection of this same material for a bracing coda in which the previously placid imagery is subjected to a caustic combination of rapid edits and atonal musical flourishes. (Unsurprisingly, both the sound and edit for this section is credited to Medina.) “Vultures live together, and they don’t fight, they help each other,” the boy says at one point—a perfectly succinct bit of childlike wisdom for a world in which pleasure and peril often go hand in hand.

“for its beauty, the perfection of the relationship between sound and image, its radical concept of cinematographic time, the sophistication of the montage, but above all, for its non-negotiable commitment to the essence of cinema – the image in time – and the didactic and community context that it generates around its work”    Fugas International Jury Award from Haden Guest, director of the Harvard Film Archive, Dora García, artist and filmmaker, and Raúl Camargo, director of the Valdivia International Film Festival (Chile)

`vulture’ website Here

Hoffman’s film `vulture’ was awarded the Best Film Award (over 45 min) by the Fugas International Competition Jury at Documenta Madrid 2020. Thanks to Isiah Medina (Editing & Sound Mix), Luca Santilli (Sound) and his band Kennedy (Music),  Dagie Brundert, Ricardo Leite,, Franci Duran, Clint Enns, Dennis Day, Zac Goldkind, Janine Marchessault and The Ontario Arts Council.

Kim Knowles on “vulture”:

“Hoffman’s vulture” a beautiful and contemplative study of interspecies co-existence, where farm animals roam freely and the camera patiently observes their various interactions. Shot on 16mm film and processed with plants and flowers, it’s also an exercise in eco-sensitivity on so many levels.” Edinburgh International Film Festival, Blackbox 

“The marks and blemishes on the surface of the film that result from hand- processing draw attention to both the mediating presence of the material and the hand of the artist in crafting a visual record of the place. Sections of the film were processed and tinted with a variety of flowers, fruits and plants from around the farm – magnolia, hyachinth, hydrangea, daffodil, rhododendron, pond algae, lilac, oregano, comfrey, rose, mint, goldenrod, hosta buds, wild garlic seeds, tansy, aster, echinacea, sunflower, and walnut. From this perspective vulture is more than just a visual appreciation of the land; it is a complex material engagement with an eco-system that draws out the expressive possibilities of living things beyond conventional forms of representation. Over a shot of a flying bird, we hear a child relating fragments of information about vultures and their hunting habits. `Vultures live together, and they don’t fight, they help each other’, says the child. `I didn’t know that’, replies Hoffman. Behind this simple exchange lie multiple layers of signification that testify to the intellectual and spiritual depth of the film, and, at the same time, point towards a philosophy of collective nurturing that quietly runs under the surface of the Independent Imaging Retreat (Film Farm).” Excerpt from “From Chapter 4, From Film Lab to Film Farm by Kim Knowles from her book Experimental Film and Photo Chemical Practices

Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices by Kim Knowles (cover image by Franci Duran)

order book Here

In Conversation: Philip Hoffman & Charlie Egleston at Forest City Film Festival Here

Read Review by Andrew Robertson, Edinburgh International Film Festival Here

Read review by Mónica Delgado Desisit Film Here

Deep 1 (2023)

Deep 1
Deep 1 (14:30, 2023)

Filmed over 2 years (2020-2022), at home and away, Deep 1 is a diaristic meditation, flower/plant processed and decayed with hyacinth and lichen extract. Winged and four legged animals, both wild and domestic, traverse the frame marked by a hand-made practice. Filmed in Mount Forest, Ontario and Dawson City, Yukon.  *available on digital & on 35mm

Ann Arbor Film Festival 2023, USA; Jury Award                                              Ribalta Experimental Film Festival 2023, Italy                                                  La Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión (EICTV) 2023, Cuba

`Deep 1′ preview

Opening audio passage from a recording of the “Gayatri Mantra” by mentor/friend Rup Chand (Ann Arbor 1979). He told me that his mother suggested he recite the words when he was in fear.

Om Bhur bhuvah svah                                                                                                          Tat savitur varenyam                                                                                                       Bhargo Devasya dheemahi                                                                                      Dheeyo yonah prachodayaat                                                                                  The Rigveda (10:16:3)

“Oh manifest and unmanifest, wave and ray of breath, red lotus of insight, transfix us from eye to navel to throat, under canopy of stars spring from soil in an unbroken arc of light that we might immerse ourselves until lit from within like the sun itself.”                         (translation from Sanskrit by Ravi Shankar)

About looking at things; envisioning a space “where we are not separated from other things.”  – R.H. Blyth

Deep 1 Frame enlargement from 16mm

“across the window,                                                                                                         birds and beasts look unaware                                                                                   of their decay” –Ph

Still Time in Philip Hoffman’s `Deep 1’ 

 by Lucia Ruggieri, Francesco D’Accia, Matteo Ricci                                          (Ribalta Experimental Film Festival, Italy)

The Gāyatrī mantra of the Ṛgveda sets-up the entire short film: it is the mantra itself that creates the atmosphere of darkness, followed by the first creation: the tree, which contains the identity of darkness as if it were its visible matter. Continue reading Deep 1 (2023)

Flowers #3 (Kissed by the Sun)

Flowers #3 (Kissed by the Sun)   10 min., 35mm photogram to HDV, Sil., 2023.    By Philip Hoffman in collaboration with Alexander Granger and Jason O’Hara

These motion picture photograms were initiated through a five hour plunge into the darkroom; remembering the Galician celebration of flowers on the road in Baiona, near Vigo in 2019, here too we made a floral carpet of photograms. –P.Hoffman

A Procession of herbs “emerge in all their structures, colors and epidermis. The motion picture itself becomes a plant which delicately stretches petioles and petals.” – Séance #3-Sentir Comme une Plante, Muséum National d’Histoire naturelle, Paris.

Flowers #3 by Philip Hoffman (Kissed by the Sun)

 

Ribalta Fest Review of Hoffman’s “Deep 1”

The Gāyatrī mantra of the Ṛigveda sets-up the entire short film: it is the mantra itself that creates the atmosphere of darkness, followed by the first creation: the tree, which contains the identity of darkness as if it were its visible matter…. (see below)

“Deep 1” Ribalta Film Fest Review

`Deep 1′ preview

DEEP 1  (2023, 15 min, HDV or 35mm)

Deep 1 (2023)

Hoffman on `Deep 1′

more on Deep1 and Flowers #3

Flowers #3  (Kissed by the Sun)             (2023, 10 min, HDV )

Flowers #3 by Philip Hoffman (Kissed by the Sun)

more on Flowers #3 (Kissed by the Sun)

…more on Hoffman’s films

 

Hoffman at Finnish Academy of Fine Arts 2016
Waterloo-born filmmaker receives Governor General’s Award

Martha Rosler on Hoffman’s Films

“Philip Hoffman is a precious resource, one of the few contemporary filmmakers whose work provides a bridge to the classical themes of death, diaspora, memory, and, finally, transcendence. As Landscape With Shipwreck makes clear, Hoffman explores these most Canadian of themes without grandiosity; instead they emerge from stories held close to the ground, the family, and personal experience, whether at home or in very unfamiliar places indeed. And he does so through a constant renovation of method that enriches the viewers’ ability to grasp how film form contains and conditions meaning. This is just the sort of human voice articulated through film that we desperately need amidst the thunder of corporate media in all forms.” (“Landscape with Shipwreck: 1st Person Cinema and the Films of Philip Hoffman”, Insomniac Press/Images Festival 2001)

 

VULTURE  (2019)

`vulture’  (frame enlargement from 16mm, processed in Oregano)

`vulture’ preview

Kim Knowles on `vulture’

“ Hoffman’s vulture” a beautiful and contemplative study of interspecies co-existence, where farm animals roam freely and the camera patiently observes their various interactions. Shot on 16mm film and processed with plants and flowers, it’s also an exercise in eco-sensitivity on so many levels.” Edinburgh International Film Festival, Blackbox

Jordan Cronk on `vulture’

more on `vulture’

CHIMERA (1995)

Chimera (frame enlargement from 16mm)

Dirk de Bruyn on `Chimera’

“The film consists of collected, diaristic images amassed through Hoffman’s travels. Uluru… Russian shoppers, a Cairo market, and day to day images from home and away… make floating appearances. These have been gathered on the run, and then reconstituted with an uncanny ephemeral floating rhythm, a dance of light, and replaying, with commendable control, the idea of visual music, visual jazz. Though the method of collection may have had an air of arbitrariness about it, the meticulous construction and focus on rhythm in the finished piece suggest an artist who has learnt to master technique so as to let it speak for him about ‘other’ things.”

more on “Chimera”

KOKORO IS FOR HEART (1999)

Kokoro is for Heart (frame enlargement from 16mm)

`Kokoro is for Heart’ preview

Liz Czach on `Kokoro is for Heart’

“Communication takes a poetic turn in Kokora is for Heart. Originating as a performance piece, the director, Phil Hoffman, screened segments of this film in a random order selected by the audience (Opening Series 3). Accompanying this was the sound poetry of Gerry Shikatani. From this process the film has found its organic and final structure.” (TIFF Program,  1999)

ALL FALL DOWN (2009)

All Fall Down (frame enlargement from 16mm)

`All Fall Down’ preview

Adrian Kahgee & Debbie Ebanks Schlums on `All Fall Down’ 

Released a decade before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Hoffman subtly questions how guests on Indigenous land, himself included, have come here to live. The film’s political-historical observations should feel like an anarchronism today…The lack of political progress regarding the Calls to Action, the effects and affects of migration, the struggles with the legal system, the impact of all of this on mental health and on future generations, are some of the pressing contemporary issues resonating today in All Fall Down.

Scott MacKenzie on `All Fall Down’

Tom Kohut on `All Fall Down’

Michael Sicinski on `All Fall Down’

Stan Brakhage on `passing through/torn formations’

passing through/torn formations accomplishes a multi-faceted experience for the viewer—it is a poetic document of Family, for instance—but Philip Hoffman’s editing throughout is true to thought process, tracks visual theme as the mind tracks shape, makes melody of noise and words as the mind recalls sound.”

PASSING THROUGH/TORN FORMATIONS (1988)

passing through/torn formations (frame enlargement from 16mm reversal  orig A,B,C,D rolls)

`passing through/torn formations’ preview

Mike Hoolboom on `passing through/torn formations’

Hoffman’s sixth film in ten years, passing through/torn formations is a generational saga laid over three picture rolls that rejoins in its symphonic montage the broken remnants of a family separated by war, disease, madness and migration. Begun in darkness with an extract from Christopher Dewdney’s Predators of the Adoration, the poet narrates the story of ‘you,’ a child who explores an abandoned limestone quarry….The film’s theme of reconciliation begins with death’s media/tion—and moves its broken signifiers together in the film’s central image, ‘the corner mirror,’ two mirrored rectangles stacked at right angles. This looking glass offers a ‘true reflection,’ not the reversed image of the usual mirror but the objectified stare of the Other. When Rimbaud announces ‘I am another’ he does so in a gesture that unites traveller and teller, confirming his status within the story while continuing to tell it. It is the absence of this distance, this doubling that leads the Czech side of the family to fatality.

complete Cinema Canada review by Mike Hoolboom on `passing through/torn formations’ Continue reading Ribalta Fest Review of Hoffman’s “Deep 1”