Category Archives: Interviews

Hand-Made (in the digital age): an interview with Phil Hoffman (by Aysegul Koc 2002)

by Aysegul Koc
March 2002

AK: When we say hand-made I think of the craft as well as the art using the hands and the labor involved.

PH: It’s sort of having control of the whole process and at the same time you are out of control. You have a pact with the process… with the world, that it has some say in what the film will be. You have great control in, for example, hand processing the film yourself… you don’t have to give it to the man with the white lab coat any more… and all your money along with it.

AK: When we talk about hand made film it’s not necessarily hand- processed film.

PH: No but it’s kind of a nice metaphor for it. In the hand processed film you are actually putting the film in the developer, swishing it around and putting it into different processes. What’s great about hand processed film is that you are never in total control. So it’s again being in control and at the same time relinquishing control because within a few seconds you can lose a beautiful image you love by leaving it in a chemical too long or not long enough.

AK: Has that happened to you?

PH: Oh sure, it happens all of the time. …it’s odd because that image still lives on in your memory. I have a lot of those… That beautiful image you saw in the dark room… gone… That’s life, right? These things move in time and when they’re gone they’re gone. This way you go against the idea that the film is precious and understand that the process is more important.

AK: But when you make a film you keep something as opposed to losing it?

PH: Well the film’s the residue. I’m talking what excites me. When I am not in control and I don’t know what’s going to happen and something does… that’s the fuel.

AK: Is there a project about which you would think ‘This can only be handmade’?

PH: It’s the way of living, the way of working, I think in the beginning I thought someday I’d make a big feature with real actors and all that, but then I came to realize that this is not the way that I work. The project that I am on now is called Commute. I can’t say anything useful about the film at this point. I started working on it in 1995… and in 1996 Marian died. I put Commute on the shelf. And now it resurfaced and it’s funny because now I am clear on how I want to work with it, whereas in 1995 it was vague. So I think after finishing Destroying Angel and What these ashes wanted, I was reminded of the way I want to work …it may be with some actors, or at least friends, but it will still be hand made. We’ll probably get a pile of people together and a pile of film and video together and start working. I’ve got the structure somewhat worked out, and the various threads of the story, but I’m not always sure what road will get me home…

AK: What exactly is hand made film? What would you consider a hand made film?

PH: I wouldn’t limit it to anything. There are many different ways.

AK: If you make a totally digital film would it still be a hand made film?

PH: I haven’t done that yet. I don’t know what that would look like. I would like to say no in some ways. And yes in other ways. I can’t really give you an answer to that. I haven’t made a completely digital film so I don’t know. But I do know that the incorporation of different elements like film footage, video footage, working on a Steenbeck, then working on a computer digitally for the editing then going back to the Steenbeck is a process I know from making What These Ashes Wanted. So because of necessity, because it’s so wonderful to work with almost seventeen, maybe twenty years, of material as I did with Ashes, on a computer, because you can call up things so fast and so easy, I’d like to think that handmade film incorporates different materials. With digital editing you have some headaches of course but… it works just like memory… boom it’s right there… I want it. In What these ashes wanted I was working on a Steenbeck and on the computer at the same time… shooting with a digital camera off the Steenbeck screen and then dumping it into the computer to work out my ideas… back and forth. It was a bit crazy because I had footage which was processed and printed way before digital editing was invented and so it wasn’t reasonable to do a keycode transfer.

I worked out my whole soundtrack, including many adjustments to the narration, on the computer which was wonderful. I found all the images I needed (super8, 16mm hand processed, still photos, video) by working out the ideas on the computer, and then I just had to master, through optical printing and video to film transfers, all of the material back to 16mm neg. In the early 1990’s I used a similar process for Chimera, using digital editing to work out the flow of images, and the frame rates, and then I went back to the optical printer and step printed the super-8 up to 16 mm negative.

AK: And you wouldn’t call that hand made?

PH: Sure, I suppose, but there is something about the physicality of hand processes that is different than mouse-made works.

AK: It wasn’t an aesthetic choice it was something that helped you work out the material.

PH: To me it was great to blend these different ways of working, these different tools. You learn something at the intersection. I think when we cross boundaries we bring what we have learned from one medium and apply it to another, and something new is discovered. Within independent film, experimental film, video art… there are many practices…ways of working. Artists find things out in their work, pass it on…this movement expands and contracts. Old movements influence new movements, new movements influence old ones…and bring it along. I remember when Jeffrey Paull was first asked to teach Photoshop, to basically move out of still film and onto computers….he was sort ordered by the administration to make the transition, and he had to teach in one of these computer labs… very un-Jeffrey Paull. So what he did was turn off all the florescent lights and bring in some nice lamps and placed them around the room… to me that’s a hand made solution. He just said: “Well wait a minute let’s not just take what’s being shoved down our throats… resist this corporate way of working…”

The term that came to being in the 60s was “living cinema” and that’s like hand-made film. In hand made making you don’t light the breakfast table… you film your loved ones, or they film you on the spot… you don’t make them pour the orange juice again… and again… and if you miss a shot, you get the next thing that comes along… light glistens off the apples on the table… the kids playing…

AK: Is this not more possible with the video camera? More people have access to it now and can do amateur work.

PH: I would say that it is but it’s different because there is usually the sound attached whereas with a Bolex it’s always just the image. In video it’s, ‘What are you doing with that toy, Jessie?’ The words become important so there’s a difference and I don’t think it’s always better though it can be… it’s how one works with it. Access is great of course, yes. For me it has less to do with technology and more about working ‘from your hand’…working ‘from your heart.’

AK: What about all the difference between mouse and hand?

PH: We have to develop ways to work with computers that isn’t so draining. For myself I find it just as exciting but sometimes I get a hollow feeling when I sit in front of a computer for ten hours whereas I just feel exhausted sitting in front of a Steenbeck… to me there is a difference. We have to work out how to get the best out of the various technologies and practices…. My body of work contains video all the way through, though it often ends on film but I try to use video and film for good purposes. So I think that integration is sort of happening and will continue to. You can take ‘a hand made perspective’ on it.

AK: When you use mixed media video, film, Steenbeck, media 100 AVID…. Instead of the actual process it shifts to a mentality.

PH: Let me ask you. You started shooting film and fell in love with it. So tell me why.

AK: It smells, it’s the very basic things. The way you like food or sex, it’s the same thing. Like sweating over the dark bag. Dealing with film macaroni when you open the magazine lid, the reward of capturing moments.

PH: (laughs) Yeah it’s good. We make a trade off. We get this wonderful memory machine, the computer. We use it. But we don’t give up the hand made philosophy and the hand made techniques you know.

AK: What you are doing, mixed media, is very important. Is this unavoidable in the future? Is this the path your work is going to take? Somehow it makes our life easy, you’re sitting in front of a computer now. You can’t go back?

PH: You hate it and you love it. I hate it and I love it. I think it’s a matter of how to make it palatable. You have to say ‘enough is enough.’ It’s like too much sugar. It’s seductive. It’s become this octopus with arms all around you, this open access. I get hundreds of e-mails a week from students, admin, strangers, filmmakers…. It’s all wide open. I think in the next five years I will be working out how to deal with this incredible communication overload. Everybody needs to do that or else there’s going to be a lot of sick people around.

AK: Is it why there is so much interest in the projects like film farm?

PH: First off it’s a retreat… you have people staying together, talking to each other about film & ideas… for a full week… quite intense… we create a very powerful energy.

AK: Don’t they come to the farm to learn hand made?

PH: Yeah, but they could do it in LIFT (Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto) workshops as well. I think it’s something else… a few years after the film farm began, some guys from a television station asked if they could come and follow the workshop for the week, for some kind of cable broadcast… and I said no because the taping process …the crew and all that… would create a rupture in the space we try to make… the workshop would become something else so I try to protect this little thing that’s kind of grown, but is still pretty small and intimate… the problem that we get into at film schools is that everything needs to be big… We need the newest technology so we need more money….so we need more students… so we get government cuts… and we can’t run this big thing that’s been created. It gets out of control. So we started the Film Farm, tore away some of that film school infrastructure so we could get back to the things we like about working in this art form The film farm is democratic… here, Karyn Sandlos and Deirdre Logue do the tinting and toning cooking show.

AK: Do they call it that?

PH: That’s what I call it.

AK: How did you start making hand made films?

PH: It came out of photography. I had a dark room.

AK: So you were already close to the chemistry.

PH: I was close to the idea of an image coming out of nothing. It’s magic you know. It’s now you see now you don’t. The image appears in the developer and that’s enough for me. I can stop right there. That moment when something is appearing you get a kick. That’s what I try to maintain in filmmaking. I don’t get a kick out of it as much when I know what’s going to happen.

AK: And video in a sense is very predictable?

PH: With video you get these moments where there is interactions with people. You get sound and you get people saying beautiful things. That’s why I use video in my films. In What These Ashes Wanted Marian is in the car talking about what she just saw behind the closed doors along the roadway during her visiting nurse calls… There is no way I could have received those moments, in the same way, with a film camera. I would have controlled it, if I used the film image, without sound. She is kind of in charge there, not me, even though I might have thought I was in charge. She is performing, and she turns things around by making me look at what I’m doing.

AK: Directly addressing you or ignoring you or looking at the traffic.

PH: Yeah, and even so much as saying, ‘This really feels uncomfortable, you’re pointing the camera at me.’ Suddenly the lens shatters because it makes you aware of the apparatus, makes you look at the construction… the filming process. Marian was so good at that, always stepping outside of the frame. That’s fantastic… I was just learning from her in some ways.

AK: It’s a process of learning handmade film… I just want to know more about the limitations and the freeing aspects of the hand-made. It sounds good to make a hand-made film but it must have limitations.

PH: It’s hard… maybe harder than working with a script. I collect images, over a long period of time, and then I have to figure out how all the pieces fit together. It’s a long process, What These Ashes Wanted took nearly five years, but actually I used footage dating back almost 20 years. passing through took six years. Road Ended at the Beach took seven years. Chimera took six years. I usually need time to think about it.

AK: One more thing, the hand made films (I’ve seen) tend to be experimental, do they always go together?

PH: There are some filmmakers working hand made and their films are more narrative. They’re working with actors. It depends… I think anything can be hand made. It’s just that hand-made is likely not to be on TV, although you say Carolynne Hew’s Swell was on TV… that’s was shot at the Film Farm… great! Just think …a hand-made film channel…

AK: (laughs)

PH: Put that at the end… ok?

AK: But what if next year at the film farm there are TV cameras wanting to watch you twenty-four hours…

PH: I won’t let them in. They have to stay at Tim Horton’s in town …they have to wait there….and we will make daily appearances when we come for coffee….(laugh) But anyway, we protect what we have. It’s really a matter of how you work and good work comes out of that. You work in a way so that you are still having fun…. you’re with people you want to be with… if the pressure gets so great that you’re not having fun, that’s not hand-made film. (laughs). Actually, it doesn’t always have to be fun but you’re learning and you’re sharing these things with people.

Living as Filming- Interview (by Barbara Sternberg 2004)

Philip Hoffman interviewed by Barbara Sternberg (2004)

BS : Hi Philip – When I saw What these ashes wanted (which I was almost afraid to see: would it make me cry over our loss of Marian; might I feel you had exploited Marian’s death for a film?), I felt it was your most successful film—most complete, most fulfilled in its methods and purpose. I mean that form and content were synthesized. (Of course, to be reminded of Marian’s liveliness and bravery in life as well as facing death brought sadness.) The film had a looseness, an openness (reduced use of the first-person voice-over, passages of silence, different types of footage and shooting styles, a relaxed episodic structure) that gave Marian, yourself and the audience respectful space. The film breathes, it’s organic-it moves forward, yes, but there are detours, meanderings in its progression. You have always done beautiful camerawork, but I could connect to this shooting and how it figured in the totality of the film more than in any other (Opening Series and Chimera have shooting I also love and seem to mark a change in approach). After the film I came home thinking how all your films carry forth certain inter-related themes: autobiography (film as constructed memory) which has been constantly examined since your first film On the Pond; the ethics of filming, most clearly stated as problematic in Somewhere Between Jalostotitlan and Encarnacion; and death. The fear I had had of exploitation, a question of ethics, was addressed in the film’s dialogue:

PICTURE: SILOUETTE OF MARIAN ON HOSPITAL CURTAIN

MARIAN: …if you could have a ritual for death what would it be…and would it be private or shared.

PHIL: ..I think it would be shared.

CAMERA TILTS TO MARIAN’S EYES…THEN TO THE LIGHT

Opening Series dealt with authorial control, an ethical problem for you, by handing over the sequential ordering of its parts to the audience and to chance. I remember you’ saying, “Why should I have total control?” (One might also think of new music’s compositional principles of indeterminancy and chance.) The choice of order of the rolls gave an element of random chance and loosened the strength of narrative line.

PH : It was also to create a space where the audience, myself and the work could come together and manifest something. Each screening would be different not just because of the order of the work, but the order would reflect its audience. For example, I had shot some footage in Egypt of this Dutch companion that we met along the way who was filming Berber people holding up their tools and crafts. My filming of him, filming the Berber man, became kind of a critique because I included the photographer in the shot. That was shown at an event where he was present in Holland. So, not only did this become an issue when we discussed it after the screening, but there was also some kind of psychic manifestation that happened in the ordering. The way the other elements proceeded and followed this problematic image forced a particular reading of the situation. This was quite surprising. It’s like divining with the I-Ching. So, in Opening Series I was also trying to deal with these sort of invisible links between people, objects, in and out of art making.

BS : In Ashes you make editing choices and yet retain an openness. Space. This new openness is not only a strateg, but a place from which to make a journey, a film. (Is there a difference for you? Is living filming and vice versa? )

PH : I approach every film differently, so I’m not sure the next one will have the same kind of openness, though I think this is something that I have been developing since the early 90’s in films likeOpening Series (1992-95), Chimera (1996), Kokoro is for Heart (1999), and most recently What these ashes wanted (2001) I suppose there is not the same need to say things so overtly as in ?O,Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film) (1986), or in some of the collaborations I made in the 90’s where it seemed the process of collaboration and its outcome was more important than developing my own voice in the way I did in the ` looser films mentioned above. The 90’s for me was a time to try different ways of working but the most common element was collaboration, whether it be an aleatory collaboration with the audience who helped to place Opening Series in an order, or my `directorial’ collaborations with Wayne Salazar in Destroying Angel (1998), Sami van Ingen in Sweep (1995) or Gerry Shikatani inKokoro is for Heart.

BS : The story (made up? I had assumed) of film kept in the freezer, unprocessed in ?O, Zoo! is told again, in What these ashes wanted, but this version and this time, it’s true – right? In Somewhere Between Jalostotitlan and Encarnacion (1984) you questioned your right to film the death of a Mexican youth—at least text over a black screen told us this seemingly true story.

On the road dead lies a Mexican youth

I put the camera down…’

(excerpt of text from Somewhere Between)

In “…Ashes…” you say that just before Marian died you two slipped out of the hospital at night down to the lake’s edge, and here’s the photo of the lake you took.

I took a picture, you skipped a stone

(excerpt of text from What these ashes wanted)

But just prior to this we see a similar scene from a TV soap opera! Ethics, authority of the filmmaker, veracity, credulity, autobiography… So much of your filmmaking and teaching favors personal story-telling and yet you question both the ethics of film and the possibility of truth. Where does Ashes stand in relation to these terms and in relation to your previous films—and where do you think you place the viewer?

PH : The fallen elephant story in ?O,Zoo!, in which I film a dying elephant and then feel badly about filming it, exploiting the elephant for this sensationalistic act, and subsequently I put the film in the freezer—is a metaphor for what actually happened in my youth as the family photographer, when I filmed my grandfather in the casket at the request of my uncle. Subsequently, in horror at what I had done, I put the film in the freezer. I think when I wrote the story for ?O,Zoo! in 1986 I didn’t realise that unconsciously I was expressing this repressed traumatic experience. I found it quite curious that I had written a fiction, that had its source in a true story, which had happened, but that I didn’t know I was creating a stand-in for this difficult experience. The unconscious was pulling at my shirtsleeve, saying look here, remember this.

In Ashes, the Baywatch scene at the beginning of Part 3 mirrors the personal story of Marian and I leaving the hospital the night she found out she had cancer. The TV soap represents the way, through mass media, our culture presents grieving. Ashes offers another method. Some of Marian’s last writings, which I cherish, came after our final walk on the beach. She wrote in a way that told me that this was not just for her, but the writing should be passed on. In her grief, she had found out something that night and was offering it up. I was the one who could release it to the world through film.

TEXT ON SCREEN (black text supered over window):

The night we had our last walk

she wrote these words:

TEXT ON SCREEN (white on black):

We come together separate

cry and look wide eyed bewildered…

I want to be near the water

We bundle up and leave the hospital for the beach

Beautiful clear crisp blue skied night

we mourn together

laughing at intervals

clinging madly to some sense of life

The open sky water makes me feel

part of something immeasurable

larger than me

and it is consoling

STILL PHOTOS OF MARIAN’S ROOM

(excerpt of text from What these ashes wanted)

So in a way, my films blend fiction with real life experience, and the fiction is usually grounded in lived experience. My sense is that once these expressions are mediated through the filmmaking, they are fictions anyway. I feel fine with this as long as what is made up is somehow a reflection of, or is based on, or comes out of a lived experience-which usually happens naturally. I try to let the experience of filming or photographing or recording audio, happen out of an authentic process of trying to find something out, or communicating something to someone. The residue of this process finds its way into my films.

I think Somewhere Between and ?O,Zoo! are dealing with ethics, but the starting points were traumatic moments that occurred while filming. I feel my calling is a filmer of life. A death occurs in front of me so I have to do something about the experience. During the filming of Somewhere Between I remember sitting on the bus with the camera on my lap, feeling the whole horrible experience. I chose not to film, perhaps more as a gut reaction, but when I returned to Toronto the aura of the boy’s death laid over me like a blanket. I wanted to still make a film about this sacred moment, which I had witnessed, without the so-called crucial image.

reaching out,

the white sheet is pulled over the dead boy’s body

the children wept…

the little girl

with big eyes,

waits by her dead brother

big trucks spit black smoke

clouds hung

the boy’s spirit left through its blue

(excerpts of text from Somewhere Between)

BS : So, in a way, all your films exist to have the audience at some moment wonder: what is truth? What is fiction? What is film? Is this truth? All of those things are floating around. As audience we go in and out of being sucked into the film the way mainstream films tend to operate on us, and then we’re conscious that this is a construct, that there are certain clues within it that make us say, Wait a minute… and give space to interact with the film. Reality is the interaction between us and this thing you’ve put out called a film.

PH : You asked me earlier if I brought the camera to the hospital to film Marian. The answer to this question expresses something of how I work, of my process. Marian was in the hospital. It was the fall of 1996, `the days of protest,’ and she was mad as hell at the Harris government and all the cuts that were occurring to the social programs. This also effected her directly `on the floor’ in the hospital she was in. She was trying to write a story about all this and she was taking pictures of herself in the hospital.

After Marian’s death, I developed the roll she had taken in the hospital, and found this picture of her, in silouette. She took it of herself in silhouette against the hospital curtain. She also filmed the same curtain from the same angle, and left herself out. Blank. The picture made me shudder. Most often, the powerful personal images, which I use in my films, have had other purposes.

Sometimes I do find it necessary to ask family or friends if I can use a particularly `personal’ recording. In an earlier work, passing through/torn formations (1988), there is a sequence about my uncle  and his daughter,  who had not seen each other for sixteen years. I met him in his pool hall hangout and told him his daughter wanted to see him. He said he’d flip if he saw her so instead he gave her a present. I followed him into the drugstore and he found this mirror that was in two parts, that folded into itself – a ‘corner mirror’ he called it. He felt it showed you the ‘real’ reflection of yourself, ‘the real you.’ It technically does this since it is constructed as two separate parts, the image of yourself, though severed, reflects into itself, thereby rendering your portrait normal, like a photograph. Your face isn’t reversed in the way a normal mirror reverses your features. In exchange for the corner mirror his daughter wanted to send her father a recording, so I taped her message to him. It was my idea to also tape her looking into the ‘corner mirror,’ describing her own facial features. I found him again, and we listened to it in my car. He was deeply moved. A few years later when I was finishing the film I asked her if I could use her voice from the recording and the film we shot of her looking into the corner mirror, and she agreed. As for my uncle, we spent some evenings looking at different cuts of the film, while he played music to it. I used his music in the film. Later I showed him parts of the finished film, though he was most interested in the music. I had thought the film could be a vehicle for me to get to know my uncle again, who used to take me fishing and teach me accordion when I was young. I guess it did somewhat, but it was a bit romantic on my part because film can only do so much. Anyway, I find that this kind of material works well for me as it rings true. It is the residue of lived experience which I can best learn through. When I start imagining something that I should film, and then I carry it out, it often seems contrived and it’s often not as useful as working with what comes along spontaneously.

BS : When I used to be the photographer for a friend’s wedding or anything like that, it kept me at a remove, this in-between space of the camera, between the event and me.

PH : It is the event. Everyone is using images, looking at pictures and video. It’s not once removed, and it is as authentic a moment as any other. The question is how to position it within your experience.

BS : It’s how you interact.

PH : It’s how our culture interacts.

BS: Your first film On the Pond (1978) starts out with you and your family looking at family slides, and on the soundtrack we hear your family commenting and reacting.

PH: Yes, to me this is a continuation of an oral tradition I learned from Babji, my grandma. She would talk to us about our dreams at the breakfast table. The difference is I use a tape recorder and transport conversations through my films.

BS: I want to go back to the term “autobiography”. You’ve made a home movie, a road-movie, a making-of-the-movie movie. I guess your films are autobiographical in that they represent the truth of how it is for you, subconsciously, psychically, spiritually, as well as materially. Do you feel the term autobiography is applicable to you?

PH : I don’t use it much because autobiography assumes that it’s just about yourself. My films are about people and places around me, though strained through my perception. When a writer uses material from their life in a novel, we do not call the book an autobiography. I suppose we might say there are autobiographical elements in the work, but that is common with most art. It is only that the photographic or electronic image is a good stand-in for the real, so we cannot get around the fact that people depicted in a `documentary’ are actually and fully ‘on the screen!’ But we know it’s still an expression or reflection of the person, of the originating moment. Films are constructions, and in my work I construct characters out of the residue of real life experiences.

BS : As Godard says: Film is truth at 24 frames per second, all film is fiction. Do you think the focus on death in your work is because of your personal experiences with your grandmother and Marian?

PH : Everyone experiences a death close at hand but not all filmmakers deal with death so directly, or so often. Maybe it was this initial experience filming my Grandfather in the casket. You know we spend our lives working through this mess…. whether it be a difficult birthing or a difficult family relationship. I’ve said before that childhood is so traumatic, most of us sleep through it… maybe the next part of that statement is that we spend the rest of our time consciously or unconsciously shedding this inevitable pain. I’m glad I have filmmaking because it seems to be a good place to put all this stuff. Maybe I was marked by that experience and I have to keep pushing the rock up the hill—my karma?

BS : Do you think it has something to do with your Catholic upbringing (we saw you at your first Holy Communion in both On the Pond and Kitchener/Berlin)?

PH : What I think my Catholic upbringing taught me was that bread can turn into body and wine can turn into blood. The material and the invisible (spiritual?) are interchangeable, certainly one isn’t more important than the other. My films, like many experimental films, take on a form that honors what we can’t see with our eyes. I work with the photographic image, this art that can represent real material objects/beings most precisely, but eventually my intent is to shed light on the things we can’t see.

BS : …or your German ancestry? The reason I mention the German ancestry is because a couple of times, in passing, you’ve made a comment to me about your name Hoffman, and that the name Hoffman is German… and I thought, perhaps, you were saying it to me because of my Jewish background.

PH : Right.

BS : And that was a link between us to that history.

PH : Yeah.

BS : And what to do with that? The burden of that history.

PH : Yeah. Yeah.

BS : So, the reason I mention it here is because, certainly recent past German ancestry calls up the Holocaust, and the Nazi period. I don’t know if that’s on your mind at all, as a burden.

PH : Well, it’s in passing through. It’s easier to deal with on my mom’s side, which is Polish—the occupation her family experienced in their homeland by the Germans. There are two stories in passing through, but it’s not dealt with directly, only as a part of the family’s shared history. I also have some old 1/2 “tapes of my German grandma looking at photos from her past and talking, so they may be a vehicle to deal more deeply with this subject.

BS : Films to come?

PH : Maybe.

BS : Are the encounters with death the catalyst for making the films? I recall Bruce Elder pointing out (in a class he was teaching) how Michelangelo Antonioni’s protagonists are separated from others and the flow of daily life by an encounter with death which gives them a different awareness.

PH : When the death of a loved one occurs you do go into a different space, and I did film some moments within that space after Marian passed away. However, I am not only in a movie, I’m also looking at my own experience from the outside as I construct the film. Certainly as time passed, my own state changed. As I make my films I’m dealing with people directly, my filmmaking is social, I’m sharing it with the world. I’m making this work and I’m showing an installation of it in Finland and Sydney. I’m not separated from the culture, I’m embracing it, trying to find a ritual to deal with death which makes sense to me, and I hope others. This makes more sense to me than the funeral parlor, the casket, and going into a room with all the flowers and everyone afraid to say anything.

BS : I remember at Marian’s memorial service. I was really enriched, and felt I had gained so much from it. But my initial reaction when you showed a film during the memorial was, I was taken aback. I thought, he’s showing a film at her memorial?! But by the end of the whole service, with everyone contributing in their own way, I felt that I had been enriched, and educated, and moved.

Ph : Well, I felt it was the only thing I could give because I couldn’t talk. It was just a poem about her first coming to the farm, and a kiss.

BS : With Opening Series and Chimera and now Ashes your shooting has changed. The camera is much less stable, more fluid and animated with shorter takes. Where did this come from? Do these signal filmic and/or philosophical developments?

Ph : I started shooting in short bursts in Chimera (and in some sequences of Ashes) around the time the wall was coming down in Eastern Europe, and the Internet was going up everywhere. My drive to fragment came from a perception that something was breaking down…well so was my reliance on the photographic image as document, as opposed to expression. I think in Ashes I maintain a better balance between these two aspects which I hold a high regard for. When free association becomes the mode of perception, which is the only sensible tool when so much is up in the air, making a mosaic film is more apt to navigate this space we live in, as opposed to the page-turning form of linear narrative. You’ve also been working in this way, evoking a kind of present-ness…

BS : With presence. When I started shooting in short bursts and single frame it was to achieve a simultaneity of place and time I think of as reality, a relatedness, which I had approached in earlier films by superimposition. Now I was trying ‘editing’ closer and closer bits. It also came from a view of myself/filmmaker as observer rather than master or in control.

PH : There have been some great developments in this kind of work, like Brakhage. Trying to develop a spiritual space for living/filming in` the now. I love his film Black Ice and the Arabic Series, and in your work I love the present-ness in Like a Dream that Vanishes. As a viewer we’re not thinking about what has happened, or what might happen. We’re right in the moment.

BS : Part of my thinking about that was if you get past the identification of what the image is, or what the narrative information of that image is, then you can get closer to a sense of being.

PH : And the flow of time.

BS : Yes, yes. That it keeps going, and you can’t stop it and hold it, and study it.

PH : “Time goes…” as Aunt Katie says in one story in Ashes. In Like a Dream that Vanishes you break it up with observations of the philosopher, John Davis, who you filmed. I think it really works, because you weave these rushing images throughout, and then we’re back listening to him talk about the `mess’ of experience…and of course we realise it’s a mess because it can’t be controlled….because living in the present is the roller coaster you can’t control.

BS : This way of shooting and making allows the complexity and wonder in. I’ve been thinking of the structure of Ashes which is more episodic than earlier works. Sequences sometimes have a loose connection, (besides being different shooting styles), but aren’t firmly attached to the preceding one. The connection isn’t justified with causality, although they seem to belong. Some were little detours and gave a bit of relief from the story of Marian’s passing. Like the Egyptian interlude. The sequences stood on their own, and yet they seemed to fit together into a whole. I felt there was a whole-ness to it, despite the fact the sequences could be quite independent. I’m wondering how you determined the structure, how you selected what to put in, and how you ordered it?

PH : It was a long and organic process that started in 1989. I was shooting single frames—zooming on each exposure to create a splayed image There were a number of projects that came out of this way of shooting: Opening SeriesChimera, and some installation works. When you are shooting without a plan, just collecting images from your life, there tends to be an organic connection between life and work.

BS : There is a unity in all your work, because you’re you.

PH : Rather than because it’s a project you are working on. As the 90’s moved along, I started working on Destroying Angel with Wayne Salazar, which Marian assisted through her talks (and recordings) with Wayne. Suddenly in the middle of it Marian tragically died. After a time, Wayne, who had a strong connection to Marian, asked me if we could use some of Marian’s story in our film, which I agreed to. At the same time, I had been asked to construct an installation in Finland. When Marian passed away, I felt I couldn’t really make the trip, but my friends there called me up and suggested I come, they’d take care of me. Since I was spending so much time going through all of the images we had together over our life, why not create something out of it? It seemed to be a positive space for me, so my friends in Helsinki helped me make a kind of offering to her, a six screen circular work, in which many of the ideas for What these ashes wanted developed. My process of finding the structure for Ashescame out of these projects which I was immersed in after Marian’s death. It just seemed to be the way I wanted to spend this grieving time. At the beginning of Ashes, there is a recording from my answering machine from Mike Hoolboom, who gracefully relays to me a story about the repairing of a precious piece of pottery, and I thought that I was trying to do the same thing with the film, with my life. To show something of beauty from a life that had been shattered through her death.

HOME MOVIE (SLOWED DOWN) OF A WOMAN (MARIAN) WALKING PAST COLUMNS IN FRONT OF EGYPTIAN MONUMENT

SOUND (TELEPHONE ANSWERING MACHINE):

MIKE: Hi Phil, I found this in a book and thought you might like to hear it, hear goes.

When I call up pictures of friends, lost, a terrible ache comes over me, so much so that it has to go away on its own, there isn’t much by way of remedy that I can do. I remember a letter of Henry James where he said that in times of great grief it was important to ‘go through the motions of life’; and then eventually they would become real again…. I’ve been trying to write myself a poem about those ancient Japanese ceramic cups, rustic in appearance, the property at some point of a holy monk, one of the few possessions he allowed himself. In a later century someone dropped and broke the cup, but it was too precious simply to throw away. So it was repaired not with glue but with a seam of gold solder. And I think our poems are often like that gold solder, repairing the break in what can never be restored perfectly. The gold repair adds a kind of beauty to the cup, making visible part of its history….

(Taken from a portion of a letter from the poet Alfred Corn, Feb 19, 1994 from the novel Heaven’s Coast by Mark Doty.)

OK I guess that’s it. See you later.

At times I think this could come off as crude, using filmmaking as a process for grieving but felt it was a way of honoring her. I went to Spain to try to find the rock opening which is seen at the start of the film, with her text superimposed, where she realizes her illness. I found this text paper clipped behind a still image of this hole, which seemed to be a cave in Guadelest, Spain. I journeyed there with her friend Belinda and we had great trouble finding it. I felt they must have removed it some how, until I looked down on the ground and saw this tiny opening, exactly the same shape as the photograph she took. We had a laugh imagining her down on her stomach trying to take this picture.

The film’s structure came after Marian’s death when I was spending this time remembering her, and bringing this film work around to friends and strangers.

BS : There was one sequence in the film, where you’re in the back seat of the car taping Marian while she works as a nurse visiting people’s homes. I thought it was a very interesting scene for its mixture of realities. Marian’s a nurse, she’s going into people’s homes, and yet this is being filmed, so is this staged for the film? No, this is real, and we’re seeing it being filmed. This scene sets up the whole question of veracity, what is real and where is the real located?

PH : Yes, that’s the synch scene where I sit in the car with this huge 3/4 inch camera, circa 1983, filming her reactions to what she has just seen on a particular home visit. She was giving up nursing so she asked me to videotape her on her last day on the job.

BS : At one point, as I recall, Marian chastises you, or gets mad at you, because you’re not answering her question.

PH : Mike Cartmell remarked that what is strong about the film is that it honors not always only her good side. You know, she was a pretty tough cookie. And it doesn’t show her necessarily in the best light, which of course, is the best light, because it was part of her. I’m in, probably, my late-twenties, and I’m saying. Yea it’s hard, the camera’s heavy. And she says, that’s not what I mean, it’s hard emotionally. It’s hard for me to be filmed, and she chastises me, and in a funny way, makes fun of me.

BS : And leaving this in gets more at this question of, where is the real in a situation? She’s saying that you answered in a superficial way. It’s an awkward situation because the camera is heavy, but she was trying to get at something below the surface. I think it’s very typical not only of your process of filming, but of Marian’s whole project of digging beneath the surface. How do we come to knowledge? What forms our sense of what’s real and true? This episode functioned on a lot of levels. I’m wondering how you see this scene functioning in the film.

PH : Well, it introduces her ‘in the flesh,’ because it’s sync sound. One of the ways that I want to represent her is as a physical being, closer to, let’s say, a realist representation of her.

BS : So it’s Marian. But its also any of us, in a sense. I mean, the film is about you and Marian, and what happened, but what if I don’t know Marian?

PH : If you didn’t know Marian, now you actually see her in the flesh. So it’s serving this purpose in the film… you are introduced to the loved one who has been lost. This is why I like to blend various forms, for example, synch sound with a more impressionistic sequence. These are different aspects of how we perceive.

But I think the purpose of this scene coming at the beginning of the film is so that there is ground to stand on for the rest of the film. We are introduced to this person in this way, twice. She comes back again, `in the flesh,’ in synch-sound talking in front of the palm trees, and again she is questioning, but mostly I like that scene because we can see her mind working…..she is constantly discovering something for the camera, which brings her to life for a brief moment.

BS : And it would seem that the process of making a film is the questioning part of the experience for you.

PH : Yeah that’s right.

BS : We’ve talked about Chimera in terms of it having been a film in three parts, and used in an installation, and now parts of it finding its way into Ashes. I just wondered how you saw that footage functioning in this film.

PH : Well, the single frame zoom footage is carried forward into Ashes, because it carries the three deaths that occurred when I was filming that way. In the early 90’s, three times death came in front of me. This occurred in 1991, 1993, and 1994. I found it strange that this kept happening, and that it was always connected to my filming. I brought these stories and this shooting forward into Ashes, because they seem to serve as a kind of premonition of death, and though one cannot really be ‘prepared’ for the death of a loved one, it seemed to make me aware that something was coming. I am troubled by these thoughts because two people died, and one nearly, which is horrific and sad. I still do not have an explanation for this so it sits in the film unresolved, like so many things in our lives….

BS : The style of that shooting, for me, points to the ephemerality of life. Each second is over, it’s not something we can hold in our hand. Whereas a still photograph gives you the illusion of having something, but really you have something out of time, and so very death-like, whereas this is alive, this is present, and yet you can’t have it.

PH : Now you see it, now you don’t. It is like that.

BS : There’s also image-to-image speed, because it’s not a single image that you zoom into and out of.

PH : Past, present and future exist at the same time, which is maybe what death is, or what happens after death. There is no form, no linear time.

BS : I also want to talk about the slow motion sequences.

PH : The first part of the film is book-ended by a shot of Marian running in slow motion, first in colour, then in black and white. As if she keeps fading, but is also eternally returning. These are representations of the dream space one is in when one has psychic trauma. She did keep coming back in dreams, or in waking life, or absurdly through the ladybug form. Just like a photograph which actually reminds me that she is gone. It is often said that photos, films or sound recordings help us to understand the past. Well, I think they also help us get through the present. Diving into this kind of footage after Marian’s passing seemed a good place for me to be.

BS : Between teaching at Sheridan College and now York University and at the Film Farm workshop, are you creating a movement within experimental film with a manifesto or credo that you espouse?

PH : I try to create a place where people can meet and be together. If it’s a movement it’s a movement of sympathy towards each other, or a place to be, where people are working together instead of tearing each other apart.

BS : Competing.

PH : Competing, or spending so much money to make a film. A place where making something is the most important thing. So I wouldn’t say that is a manifesto, but it is a place where I feel right. The farm workshop is set up so that people need to be there for the whole time, so it’s a retreat. They need to come without a script, and part of the idea is that there is a film inside and no matter where they are, it can be coaxed out. In the time they spend at the workshop they can make a start on that, or finish it, wherever they end up at the end of their stay. Participants learn certain processes, working with a Bolex, with light, with hand processing and tinting and toning. They don’t have to worry about getting it exactly right, sometimes the accidents help them find their route. It’s a bit like cooking, tasting what you’ve done, adding a few more spices here and there.

BS : I thought we could call this interview “Man with a Movie Camera” and use the photo of your silhouetted torso with swinging arm suspended by a Bolex-holding hand. I think you’ve had an image of you-with-camera in every film you’ve made. Is this honesty (this film is made by someone, it’s not objective truth) or autobiography (and that someone is me)? Is your life lived through making a film of it?

PH : Isn’t it something like a signature? Though this moves against the idea of giving up authorial control. But I think there is something important for me about being able to see where I’ve been through my films, and my life, and the people who have taught me things.

Philip Hoffman (Radio Banff Interview 1989)

by XX – Autumn 1989

XX: Last evening in the Banff Auditorium there was a screening of three films by an independent filmmaker from Toronto, Philip Hoffman, who has been in the artist colony for the past week; rejuvenating and working on ideas and basically plumbing the depths of new ideas for, and taking shots around the Banff area for up and coming films that he may make or will make. Philip’s in the studio this evening with us. He leaves tomorrow, you leave tomorrow morning.

PH: Yes, short stay. Short stay. Good one, though.

XX: It seems like quite a homey bunch in the artist colony at the moment.

PH: Really good group. We’re working on our own, plus we seem to be working together too. Everybody’s looking at each other’s work, and it’s nice to meet new people.

XX: In the artists colony there are times when people are producing intensive work and you rarely even see them. You hear that so-and-so is here, and nobody even in the colony knew because they would sneak out in the middle of the night, and be gone by dawn. Sleep all day… or however they worked.

PH: I’m sure that still prevails.

XX: Yeah, oh yeah. It’s just that there’s a liberty that I think is wonderful when you’re in the colony. Maybe you could just tell us a little bit about your background. I know you began as an amateur photographer in your youth, and maybe you could take it up from there.

PH: Yeah, that’s just one of the stories that I put out.

XX: Is that the real one?

PH: It could be. Yeah, it was important, photography, right from the start; when I was thirteen, fourteen years old. I managed a darkroom in the basement of the house. And went out collecting images. As I was saying last night, after all these films I’ve made, about eight now, I’ve realized how that’s been so important in my work. Both being interested in the realist image in photography and questioning that image. And on the other hand, the magic that happens in the darkroom when the image starts coming up, when you’ve got the paper in the developer, in that moment of transformation, that fleeting moment that you can’t really put your finger on. Those things are happening always in your life, I think… in my life. How to try to use film to conjure that transformation? Maybe it’s in the view or in the viewer’s mind that moment might appear.

XX: So you’re saying that magical moment, which for you was when the picture started to appear in the developing process, is possibly transferred to perception? When the viewer perceives your work. Is there another place for you where that magic still exists in the making of a film?

PH: Yes, there is. It’s in the shooting and the interaction between camera and subject. I like to work from that rather than from scripts and confront my subject whatever it may be, and let the structure and the rhythms of the film come out of that moment in shooting. Sometimes I just go collecting images, and that tells me what a future film might be. Which is something evolving here for the past week in Banff, giving myself the time to concentrate on that kind of work.

XX: You use the term diarist not only for your films but the working method. So it’s a very ongoing process, you never start with a script, you collect and assemble.

PH: I don’t think it’s an unusual way of working for artists in any discipline. It’s an unusual way to work in film, when you consider that 99% of the stuff that we see on television and feature films is prefab, the script’s got to be there, or the money doesn’t happen. When you’re working with a Bolex or in Super-8, with small equipment, you have control of the costs so you can work another way. I may work on larger projects in the future, but I would always like try to hold on to the role of intuition. I’m sure this happens in feature films, when people are working with actors there must be moments when the script is changed right on the spot. This is important because filmmaking doesn’t happen on paper.

XX: In a recent interview out of the University of Calgary and in your comments last evening about the films, the word memory came up. And in seeing the films, your approach to time and the use of memory especially in the second film breaking through/torn formations… breaking through or is it the other way around?

PH: Passing through.

XX: passing through, sorry.

PH: Slash, torn formations.

XX: Those two elements. Almost the manipulation of time. Not in a way that’s so rigid you feel some sort of structural approach, but in a way that’s definitely engaging, mixed with your concern about memory. I remember in the Calgary interview you said that memory was something that we were going to have to deal with in the latter part of this century because most mass media is creating a passive viewer, creating things which are very fleeting and ephemeral so we don’t use memory in the same way. I think you’re broaching that subject in your films.

PH: The mass media freezes and packages history so when we think back, we think of what’s been documented. Why do we imagine the world before 1930 in black and white? Time should move on and it shouldn’t be pinned down. For everything that you’re doing in the present you have to remake or question the past. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do in the film, by using personal experience, and reworking it. In some of the early works I dealt with home movies more and still photographs of the past, and tried to make a history that would sit well with me at the time of the making. Now maybe in ten years I don’t like that. I’m not really sure where it’s going, but Chris Marker, the maker of La Jetéeand Sans Soleil said that memory is the most important thing we have to deal with in the latter part of this century.

XX: The first film ?O Zoo! The Making of a Fiction Film was for me the most accessible in terms of… there’s a certain lightness to it, and even the camera and editing style was much more conservative and traditional. The other two passing through/torn formations and Kitchener-Berlin both used really interesting collage and superimpositions and almost rhythmic imaging that I found quite fascinating. But before we get into that, the whole idea of history which you brought up in the second film, torn formations, you’re dealing with a very personal subject; your family, your mother’s side of the family coming from Czechoslovakia. What I wonder is, this is you making a film, but is it also you working through a very personal thing, that you had to work through and this was the way you were doing it through the making of this film?

PH: I showed it out in Vancouver, and someone said it was an exorcism, which sort of struck me weirdly at first, but then I thought hmmm… if so it’s not over. I guess there’s a lot of things we put under the table and don’t want to look at, and this was something I wanted to look at, because I thought that it might be of value, firstly to the family and secondly the issues of immigration and the incredible pain that comes through that kind of movement which is amplified by my mother’s family coming from Czechoslovakia to Canada in the 1920’s… well it wasn’t Czechoslovakia then, it was the Austria-Hungarian Empire in the twenties… and how the pain echoed down the line through the children. So in that way I think it’s universal as well as my own personal thing of dealing with it.

XX: I felt that there was enough objectivity in the film, there were enough characters, there was enough scope in the film that it didn’t look like a self indulgent home movie. Obviously it goes much, much further than that, and even though everyone in it is your family, the way you approached it and also in the way you present it, the style never allows its viewer to sink into that reverie of just thinking about it as being one specific family, it’s swirled around so that any personage becomes a sort of universal person. The first image shows your Grandmother or an old woman and her daughter, would that be her daughter?

PH: Yes.

XX: I found myself immediately identifying them as family characters. Their particular identities didn’t matter, they were people on the family tree that were established and they would come back and more of their story would be revealed by having another person down the line. I found that fascinating.

PH: I’m glad it worked like that. The formal experiment is the thing with memory… [TAPE ENDS]

XX: …and with a lot of pop videos it’s almost as if they don’t think they can keep your attention with a shot longer than two seconds. They chop it up according to certain rhythms to make it seem dynamic and exciting but sometimes it’s totally exhausting. With your work on the other hand, I’m thinking of Kitchener-Berlin, a work in progress I believe, in which you show buildings, is it a town square or something like that…?

PH: Yes.

XX: It’s swirling. It gives you a sense that they’re swirling around a crowd. And then you also have the ground—the pavement of cobblestones—moving underneath that and at first it seems impenetrable when you’re first presented with it—plus you have the sounds of bells clanging along. At first I was bewildered and then I felt that I had to make a decision, visually, what I was going to do, because I couldn’t watch the thing spinning around—it was making me dizzy for one thing—and so I concentrated on the most immobile part, the crowd sitting there. But at the same time your peripheral vision knows; it’s almost as if you’ve set up contexts within contexts. They’re going at different speeds. They’re taking up different parameters, or sizes of your visual capacity. And I found that whichever one you looked at you were getting them all because there was this counterpoint going on.

PH: It’s new, you know. When it hits its peak four images are superimposing and I’m still getting to know its effect. The same thing happened to me last night when I was watching it and I saw things that I hadn’t seen. It was interesting that you could… well you would never really watch it so many times before you could pick out every little thing, but… it’s shifting. It lets the viewer participate in a way because you’re not hemmed down to looking at only the thing that the filmmaker’s saying you have to look at. It’s giving you choices.

XX: Definitely, even if it is a whirlwind viewing. And it was interesting too, just to see some of the people from our Layton colony group and how they were perceiving the films in different ways. We talked about that. Your films somehow shows us each of us how we look, it represents the way each person sees. There were certain points where there were ways of seeing where you just allow yourself to be taken and the composite images become a unified matter in which no one image is more or less than another. In Kitchener-Berlin, I think I got a sense of what you were trying to say about Germanic culture in Canada before the First World War and after the Second World War, the alienation of being in a country which isn’t your country any longer. That repeated spiral from the Berlin Wall moves upwards into the sky. At first they seem like images that go by and by and by but because you’re not bombarded, it’s not like a rock video where you’re bombarded. I found that you’re enticed and provoked into questioning, “Well why is this scene in there, and what is that?” Some are quite short. There are some scenes of a street in Kitchener, I guess, with the streetcars when they had Berlin on the side of them. You only see them for a moment but you know this is an old picture. You just have enough time to see the Berlin on the side and you don’t know whether it’s Germany or if it’s Kitchener… if it’s Canada. And the whole thing draws you along. The sense of alienation comes through, the ambiguity between it being Berlin one day and Kitchener the next.

PH: I’m from Kitchener in Ontario and before World War I, or on the crest of that, the name was changed from Berlin to Kitchener because of the war and what was happening inGermany. So I wanted to try to deal with that, but I was afraid that people were going to say, “Well this is not a film about Germany or the German heritage, because you’ve got these images off the TV of the Pope visiting the native people.” I just kept fighting this project of doing something about the German people in Kitchener so directly because my experience of Kitchener shared many different cultures, not just the German culture and that’s what happens with migration to the new world or to Canada. The game changes and what we end up with are stereotyped images of Germany, and German dances, colliding with Canadian culture.

XX: Now this work is still in progress. You didn’t show the second half of it, last night. What’s the subtitle of the first part?

PH: A Measured Dance.

XX: A Measured Dance. That in itself is a provocative title.

PH: Yes, when I screened it in David Rimmer’s class in Vancouver he said that as a country becomes fully controlled by the state, the dancing becomes more regular and measured. Now with the wall breaking down the dancing around East and West Germany is a little less measured. They’re pretty wild on the streets right now. The measured dance also pertains to the dance of technology and the repetition which I think is shown through the repetition of television imagery, the screen flashing through the TV bars.

I used a SteadiCam for its fluidly, though put it to a different use than usual, which is to follow a doggy to his dog food in some commercial. My operator was making circular motions and trying all kinds of things which she had never tried before with a SteadiCam and that’s what you’re speaking about at the end where everything’s spinning.

XX: It gives an incredible fluidity to the piece which I found extremely musical. The composer who wrote and performed the music for Zoo and passing through is Tucker Zimmerman?

Ph: Yes.

XX: Is he based in Toronto?

PH: No, he’s an American draft dodger who had a composer’s scholarship in Italy during Vietnam and didn’t come back so he wouldn’t have to go to the war in Vietnam. There he met this lovely woman Marie-Claire from Belgium, so now he lives in Belgium, he’s quite an amazing person.

XX: Did you meet him when you were in Holland doing ?O Zoo!?

PH: Yes, we had a mutual friend, Ton Maas, who was helping me out and when I told him about the type of music I was interested he said I should go see Tucker in Leiges. I had about five days and he was pretty laid back for the first four days. We just played baseball… he was still living sort of the American way…

XX: ..in Belgium.

PH: He got a baseball team going there. But anyway, on the night of the fourth day we looked at the film and it was amazing how he just… you know he wanted to get to know me as a person, he felt that was more important than seeing the film. And I can go for that kind of working relationship. He also did the music for passing through/torn formations a couple years after that. I was so impressed by the way he created a kind of… the repetition of… well, he uses a synthesizer and he mixes real instruments with it, but how he created that sort of… Philip Glass type music with a Czech quality to it.

XX: If you’d heard it without the film you wouldn’t say it was specifically Czechoslovakian, but it does have something about it… it’s almost the tonal quality, there’s a bit of an Eastern something in there. There’s one scene where the narration describes your uncle who was an accordion player and we see someone’s hands running over a keyboard and the music at that point is repetitive synthesizer which gradually blends into actual accordion sounds. It’s really quite brilliant. It’s almost imperceptible and suddenly you feel yourself drawn in by this real instrument.

PH: The image shows a piano, the sound is an accordion with a synthesizer behind it. So instead of the conventional master-slave relation between picture and sound, when you see someone’s finger hit a key then you have to hear the note we worked until the music playing with the image rather than following the image. Most films are allowed to be made because of the way words fall on a page, and not the sound in a scene. For me film is much closer to music than literature, because they are rhythm based and move in time.

XX: Light and time. Just one more question about the audio of the films; when you’re collecting shots is audio also something you’re thinking about or is it only when things start to come together in the lab that you deal with the oral dimension?

PH: The collecting of sound and images happen at the same time. In passing through/torn formations I had a rough cut of the film with all its sound except for the voice over, yet even the voice over was written during certain experiences in journal form and then once the images started coming together with the rest of the soundtrack, I started placing the narration that goes along with it and the voices collected of the family members telling their different stories. While I made ?O Zoo! I collected the voices that are in the background. When I got the images back I would write something, so there’s a big pot of soup and all these different ingredients in it and it gradually, hopefully tastes OK.

XX: Right. Little personal spice put on it in the end. I find the making of ?O Zoo! fascinating in that it’s a film made within a film- like Shakespeare’s play within a play. Were you actually working with Peter Greenaway as an assistant?

Ph: I would help out sometimes, but I had a camera and could go where I wanted. He was encouraging me to make more films because he had seen some early work that he liked. The film’s not really about him, it skirts along his feature film A Zed and Two Noughts as well as some of my side trips out in Holland.

XX: There’s a few scenes in ?O Zoo! that… I don’t know if the footage is from him or was it taken at the same time as he was filming?

Ph: The footage was shot while he was shooting as well, and I got access to all their sound. I worked in the same space they did while editing.

XX: It sounds like a really rare experience for a commercial film, although I guess this was the first big commercial feature he did.

Ph: Peter Greenaway made Draughtsman’s Contract before that, but even that was Super 16, it wasn’t 35 millimetre, and his previous short work had been done in 16mm. With A Zed and Two Noughts he was struggling with things, not always real happy on the set. And sometimes he would come up to me and say that he envied what I was doing… he has a Bolex. Actually he said after he’s starting to make a diary film.

XX: A Zed and Two Noughts is nonetheless a fascinating film and it’s definitely not mainstream. It’s quite…

Ph: Well, that was part of the reason I went over, I wanted to see how someone who has worked as an artist-he’s a painter as well, trained in art school-how he would work in the commercial industry. He has people around him, producers and that, who are interested in not so much in making money, but making films that are important for our cultures.

XX: It seems in every art right now the whole aspect of financing and support whether it be moral support, or financial support is such a big question, especially since so many art forms have integrated a certain array of technology so in order to make certain kinds of art you need an incredible amount of support and the film industry has certainly gone that way. To make so many films that are not good films and if you look at the budget it’s just astronomical.

PH: Filmmakers can really work another way. They can work like a still photographer if they want. I guess you need a grant to get the materials paid for because that’s where it gets expensive but if you can manage that then you can pick up a Bolex for five hundred bucks and you’ve got your camera that does anything. Images can be blown up to 35; I’ve seen some of my stuff blown up to 35 with the Bolex and it looks great. I mean, it’s not something that normally happens but… and just an editing bench and… You could transfer to tape if you want, there’s such a push and hype around video right now, not like in Europe, over here the attitude is let’s get all this video equipment and figure out what to do later.

XX: Yeah, figure out what to do later.

PH: Video will find its place if it hasn’t already, but it doesn’t mean film is dead. When photography arrived painting didn’t die, it changed. I think film should be an integral part of any art institute.

XX: You’ve been teaching at Sheridan College’s Media Arts Department for three years?

PH: I’ve been there about eight years part time along with doing my own work. Now I’ve taken a year off to do some other kinds of things and I’m enjoying it a lot.

XX: Great. I was just thinking of one scene in torn formations in which you show your mother through the video scanning lines. Instead of trying to clean that up, instead of looking at it as an impingement upon what you’re doing, you get these scan lines going and at one point you superimpose a fence or bars or something across it which transforms these scan lines into an iron grate.

PH: I’ve worked with video in quite a few of my last three, four films, but didn’t have the money to transfer the video to film, so when shooting the video I put the camera on its side, which places the scan lines vertically instead of horizontal, so that it would sort of match the shape of the human body, rather than cutting the head off. The reason the line is there is because I couldn’t afford getting it transferred professionally. I used an Éclair camera which allows you to change the shutter angle in order to minimize the flicker and scan lines. This way I could shoot a lot of video and decide what I wanted to use later. Once the film gets old you get scratches and it all looks like a scratch (laughs).

XX: I think we’re going to play some of the soundtrack. So for anyone that was at the screening last night you can remember the pictures, and for those who weren’t you can make your own. This is from ?O,Zoo!, and maybe it will catch your imagination and sometime in the near future you will get a chance to see some films by Philip Hoffman. You’re heading out to Edmonton tomorrow morning to show some films up there?

PH: Friday and Saturday in Edmonton, and then Tuesday in Regina.

XX: So this is the Philip Hoffman Western Canadian Tour.

PH: (laughs)Well  I was in Vancouver and Calgary… so it’s been great to talk to people who are dealing in film and video through the west. You get to looking at yourself in Toronto and you need to travel so I decided to make the trip.

XX: Great. Well, it’s been wonderful having you at the centre last week and wonderful to hear and see your work and to have you here this evening. Good luck.

PH: Thanks.

Somewhere Between interview with Philip Hoffman (by Donnalee Downe 1984)

by Donnalee Downe
23 November 1984

DD: Can you tell me a bit about how you went about shooting and editing Somewhere Between Jalostotitlan and Encarnacion?

PH: I had been reading some Haiku poetry at the time. Haiku is a Japanese form of poetry which is very simple, yet complex in its simplicity. In fact, when I went down to Colorado that was a poetry convention of sorts. So I decided what I wanted to do in Mexico was shoot in a similar fashion, borrowing from the form of Haiku poetry.  I tried to think of the Bolex camera’s twenty-eight second wind as a structure rather than a limitation. Most of the shots in the film are twenty-eight second takes: the “breath” of the Bolex camera.

I tried to make each shot sparse in its content: the coke sign, the donkey, the open road, the mother and child running, (c) simple, uncomplicated shots. In shooting The Road Ended at the Beach, I had a lot of expectations… about “the big trip”. I felt I had to make the film, it was my first since school. There was a lot of pressure and tension and not much fun.  So it was important with Somewhere Between Jalostotitlan and Encarnacion to shoot when I felt like shooting so it would be more like writing poetry.

DD: But it wasn’t until you returned that you decided it would revolve around an image you didn’t have.

PH: Right. So in a way it was a lot of little poems. On the trip I kept a journal and I tried to write little phrases based on the haiku form. Not that it was at all like traditional haiku. I tried to develop a style, to let a form develop out of an idea. When I came back from the trip I didn’t know what the film would be about. I hadn’t shot that much film—about seventeen minutes—and the film is only six minutes long, so it was pretty economical. When I came back, the experience on the bus was still on my mind. I didn’t have the footage and didn’t regret not having it, it was something I just didn’t want to do at the time. I remember putting the camera down and thinking no, I don’t want to do this.

DD: The sparse images you described facilitate open interpretation. The emptiness opens to the missing image.

PH: They’re open but there are still some things that were on my mind while shooting. I kept going back to the churches.

DD: Are the religious images linked to the boy’s death?

PH: No, they’re a reflection on my own experience as a Catholic.  Religion is most visual in Mexico. I was interested in icons and in the beat people—beatific in the Kerouac sense—sympathy to humanity. I see more spirit in the people than in the icons, let’s put it that way.

DD: How do icons function in the film?  We talked earlier about film language. The meaning of the images is largely defined through the film itself through their relation to the death, and yet the icons have such strong connotations.

PH: Yes you can interpret an icon in many ways. For me it was a way of working through Catholicism. You’ll see more of it in my next film.

DD: Did you decide to tone the black and white footage to facilitate a less dramatic contrast with the colour footage?

PH: From a formal standpoint it helps blend the high-contrast shots with the colour. I also wanted it to look old—but not the way we are used to seeing representations of the past in film. Hollywood uses sepia. My first text states “looking through the lens/ at passing events,/ I recall what once was/ and consider what might be.” The first shot is of a black band. We hear the music of a saxophone and see a trumpet. There’s a sort of visual/aural pun there. We’re used to sync sound, but in the last line of the preceding text it’s clear that, well, with film we can do whatever we want.

DD: In the text you changed tenses. For example in the third text: “The white sheet is pulled over the dead boy’s body/ the children wept.”  It’s almost like looking at someone’s memory. The temporal connections are unclear but we’re content with ambiguity.

PH: I believe in an open form where you’re not told what to think. I suppose it is a metaphor for memory. I honestly didn’t think about the different tenses in the text, I went with what sounded good to my ear.  It jumps around and that’s in keeping with putting myself in the past while making, finding myself on the bus again, while I’m really at home in my Bathurst Street basement.

DD: The shot with the Coke sign and the donkey cart has temporal ambiguity too. The sign is obviously modern and the cart so primitive.

PH: Again, there are many ways this can be taken and the ambiguity is important. For example, the last text: “big trucks spit black smoke/ clouds hung/ the boy’s spirit left through its blue.” What is that blue? Is it blue smoke from the trucks? The blue of the brick wall?

DD: It brought me back to the wall.

PH: It did? That’s one of the things I liked about the line. It is ambiguous and I don’t profess to have an answer. To end on a line like this ” the boy’s spirit left through the blue” it’s almost like a traditional religious experience. I suppose this brings us back to my Catholic history and the icons in the film. The line is directly from the journal and was written on the bus. I suppose it was the blue sky that I saw at the time.

DD: I’m comfortable with ambiguity. I guess it’s partly because the second text tells me that there’s no footage of the central image. I don’t have expectations. I don’t wonder how the boy died.

PH: It was the second death I’d seen on the trip. The first was a terrible car accident in Colorado. I didn’t film that either. The windshield was the movie screen and the camera was right there, but no way.

DD: Do you remember deciding not to film the Mexican boy?

PH: I remember my hand on the camera and it would have just been a matter of leaning out. I guess all the media footage we see every day flashed through my head.

DD: I think the absence of the footage is more striking. We’re saturated with media-like images.

PH: Well, the media images are striking, but I think in this case actual footage wouldn’t leave any room for analysis of death and our feeling towards it. Media images are too overpowering. That’s why I put the camera down. I think it’s more successful as a meditation in its absence. There is another text which I think is awkward, yet perhaps one of the most important: “I should have a bible,/ you suppose I lent it to someone/or someone stole it.” Most people ask, “Is that poetry?” It brings us back to the first person that’s having this experience. For me, it symbolizes a loss of religious faith in the Word, in the icon, in what we’re taught in religious classes. Today the Bible seems irrelevant. People take whatever meaning they want and use it for their own cause… and yet the Bible (like the film) is an open form. Its ambiguity facilitates many interpretations.

DD: I guess it’s a question of how didactic one is about a particular interpretation.

PH: Perhaps that’s how it should be read. Let people read it and take out of it what relates to their experience… rather than Jim Baker and the P.T.L. Club saying what it means.

DD: For me, the music really helps define my proximity to the central image. When the tempo is upbeat, in the shots of the two bands for example, the boy is almost forgotten. When the music slows I feel closer to the tragic event. Can you explain how you and the musician decided upon the music?

PH: I showed Mike the film and we worked on it together. I left the film with him and he worked with it and soon certain riffs started to develop, and then it was just a matter of getting it right. We did six takes and I edited the first version which I wasn’t really happy with.  Because it was edited it didn’t seem continuous, it didn’t seem to flow, so we tried again. This recording went directly to 16mm magnetic tape. There were things that he did that, if he was three frames off, it would change the mood completely. We did seven new takes and finally we felt we had it. We were both really tired but decided to try one more and we got it. Only one section was edited, I took that whole section from the sixth take. I think it’s hard to write the music down, it’s certainly possible but perhaps it’s not as direct. I like to work in a way so that everything comes out of experience.

DD: The diarist of The Road Ended at the Beach expresses frustration and disappointment at the failure of events to live up to expectation. One has a strong sense that the camera comes between you and your fellow travelers, thatit distorts what you want to record.

PH: At one point in this film I state: “The best time for me is when I’m on my own with the camera.” Later there’s another reference to how the camera gets in the way. At this point the spectator realizes that the camera is part of the event. In the first part of the film we are painting the van, it’s very mysterious. The guys are preparing for the trip west. It’s very linear at first, setting up the form. I suppose one of the first references to the camera is in a shot in the cabin.  Rub Chan asks me if I want some whisky and starts to get up. Richard says, “No, No, No, don’t get up.” And I get out from behind the camera. It’s the first filmic reference to the  camera. There are a lot of problems with directly autobiographical films. It seems that when a film is too direct, too personal, you meet a lot of obstacles. I tried to use my personal experiences as a vehicle for something more universal. In Somewhere Between Jalostotitlan and Encarnacion the universal experience is death. It’s an analysis, not just of personal experience, but of how this experience is incorporated in a much larger context.