By Ken Paul Rosenthal from http://www.incite-online.net/rosenthal.html I am flying on Air Canada to Phil Hoffman’s Independent Imaging/Filmmaking Retreat on a farm northwest of Toronto, where I will shoot and process motion pictures, learn tinting and toning, and view contemporary experimental films. It’s been 11 years since I was introduced to the tactile universe of … Continue reading Shot of Solitude: Hand (and Heart) Processing at the Film Farm →
*Karyn Sandlos & Deirdre Logue: `darkroom chores’ (photo by John Porter 2002) by Janine Marchessault The representation of nature has been a central and longstanding aesthetic preoccupation in Canadian art and iconography. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in a series of films that have emerged from Philip Hoffman’s Hand Processing Film workshop … Continue reading Women, Nature and Chemistry: Hand-Processed Films from The Independent Imaging Workshop →
Alex Lilburn Interviews Philip Hoffman 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 … Continue reading Connectivity 2025: vulture at Carsey-Wolf Center, UC Santa Barbara →
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by Jeff Hicks Kitchener Post March 10, 2016 Philip Hoffman is a diary filmmaker, a scotch-tape scavenger of scattershot memories. He finds them, crimped and creased, on the photographic scrap-heaps of life and time. He holds them in his disjointed card deck of disarray. Then, maybe one inspired day, he sticks them to celluloid home … Continue reading Waterloo-born filmmaker receives Governor General’s Award →
(16mm, 23 minutes, 1986) Director, Producer, Writer, Cinematographer, Editor: Philip Hoffman Music: Tucker Zimmerman “Philip Hoffman’s ?O,ZOO! (The Making of a Fiction Film) uses a diary format to skirt along the edge of someone else’s filmed narrative (Peter Greenaway’s A Zed & Two Noughts), and to trace the anatomy of pure image-making. ‘Pure’ is … Continue reading ?O,Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film) →
Opening Series consists of twelve segments, each segment in its own hand-painted film canister. Using the visual references on the canisters, the audience, prior to each screening, makes an arrangement of pictured canisters, which orders the flow of the film. I wanted to find a way of working with images that would allow them the … Continue reading Opening Series 1992-2000 →
An interview by Mike Hoolboom (2001) Philip Hoffman: After finishing the autobiographical film cycle I wanted to play again. I brought a super-8 camera along with me to Banff in order to do some sketching. I began exposing a frame at a time while zooming, or moving the camera. The result was a Cubist kind of taking … Continue reading Duets: Hoffman in the 90s: an interview (by Mike Hoolboom 2001) →
The films of Philip Hoffman have revived the travelogue, long the preserve of tourism officials anxious to convert geography into currency. Hoffman’s passages are too deeply felt, too troubled in their remembrance, and too radical in their rethinking of the Canadian documentary tradition to quicken the pulse of an audience given to starlight. He has … Continue reading An interview with Philip Hoffman (by Mike Hoolboom 1989) →
by Gary Popovich The films of Philip Hoffman exemplify a process in which raw, amorphous experience undergoes examination, whereupon the filmmaker’s initial emotion and volition are sublimated to a state of cognition. The filmmaking process acts as a catalyst organizing nature, objects, people, events, film (and other media), memory, and time into a comprehensible form … Continue reading Philip Hoffman’s Films →