(1996, 15 minutes, 16mm) Music by Tucker Zimmerman
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.(Dirk de Bruyn, Melbourne Film Festival Catalogue 1996)
“Chimera is Hoffman’s most understated film that explores his two most common themes: death and chaos. And it is perhaps his most immediate film dealing with frozen moments, life transitions and fragments of memory. The shots are in constant movement and it makes the image blurred a good portion of the time; periodically, a readable moment will appear, just briefly, and then the movement continues. It’s a statement in chaos at its most heightened state. The world is blurry with only snatches of clarity—it’s moving fast with only glimpses of calm. You never know exactly where you are or what is going on, except for fleeting moments.” (Janis Cole, P.O.V 58, 2005)
In 1989 I finished the film Kitchener-Berlin and put a close to a cycle of work which dealt directly with myself, and how self is expressed/constructed cinematically. At the same time I took my old super-8 camera out of the closet, and began collecting images, using the single-frame-zoom. Cubist in its visual delivery, the single-frame-zoom builds a splayed reality that brings together disparate vantage points simultaneously, and serves as the glue that blends and bonds peoples, places and spaces in Chimera. (Philip Hoffman)
Chimera was shot during a time when I had the opportunity to travel, a time of tremendous change; between 1989 and 1992 in Leningrad, London, Egypt, Helsinki, Sydney and Uluru. It was optically printed and edited in Helsinki in 1992; completed in Mount Forest in 1995. (Philip Hoffman)
AWARDS
Best Experimental, Athens International Film Festival – 1997
REVIEWS & ARTICLES
Chimera – Philip Hoffman (Canada, 1996, 16mm, 15:00 min): “Chimera is Hoffman’s most understated film that explores his two most common themes: death and chaos. And it is perhaps his most immediate film dealing with frozen moments, life transitions and fragments of memory.” – Impakt, The Netherlands
DISTRIBUTION
Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Centre
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Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5V 3A8
telephone: 416-588-0725, email: bookings@cfmdc.org
web: www.cfmdc.org
Canyon Cinema
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San Francisco, CA, USA. 94103
phone/fax 415-626-2255, email films@canyoncinema.com
web: www.canyoncinema.com