Monthly Archives: January 2017
Video by Jenn Norton
Video by Jenn Norton
Waterloo Born Filmmaker Receives The Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (Jeff Hicks, K-W Record)
York University Prof Receives Governor General Award
Philip Hoffman is one of the most influential experimental film artists working in Canada today. He has created a remarkable and sustained body of media art over nearly four decades in that has had an immense impact on several generations of Canadian experimental filmmakers and digital moving image artists.
His enduring impact is seen in the development of personal filmmaking, techniques of hand-processing and artisanal production, and the method of process cinema. His work combines sensitively observational documentary aesthetics, attentive to small gestures and humanist themes, with innovative forms of cinematic experimentation. Hoffman’s inquiry is tied to a deep sense of social responsibility and a profound commitment to pedagogy and to community.
– Michael Zryd, Associate Professor, Department of Cinema & Media Arts, York University
Saugeen First Nations Takes ON Film 2018
If there is life in the BARN: it will survive. (by James Holcolme 2016)
Philip Hoffman interviewed
by James Holcombe
LUX January 22, 2016
Can you talk a little about the history of the land and buildings before they became a rural lab? Can you paint a textual picture of the landscape over the seasons and how the equipment is bedded down for the winter – what do you have to do to keep quite complex machines working and functional?
I got the property in the early 1990’s, with my partner at that time Marian McMahon, with the idea of creating a kind of school for image-making. The old stone house was built by Henry Chilton in the 1880’s, and had been used for farming ever since. The farm is approximately 50 acres, and some of it is used by my neighbours for farming purposes, in exchange for various things over the years… Erwin dug the pond and built a foundation for an extension to the house. Tom plows my lane and gives me a freezer of meat every year from his grass fed animals that graze on the land. We started the workshop in 1994 with Rob Butterworth, Tracy German and Marian McMahon, and at the time my neighbour had cows in the bottom of the barn, so we had mooing sounds echoing through the barn while we screened films! The old barn, built probably in the 1920’s is an old Mennonite constructed structure, held together solely by wooden pegs. Over the years my partner, Janine Marchessault, and I have had to maintain the barn by having our friend Jon Radojkovic, who’s an expert in timber frame barns, help to keep it standing, as the barn shifts. In 2007 he did a major repair, as the barn was shifting quickly. My neighbour Wayne put some cement posts at the back of the barn and Jon tightened some of the major beams using a permanent winching system, with thick wire, and replaced some beams by jacking the barn up…the jacking is done over a few months, raising the barn a fraction of an inch every week. So the barn is in a constant state of repair. Every winter the animals, the wind and snow take over the barn. We cover everything in tarp and hope the machines start up again in the spring!
Read the complete interview here.
