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

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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.

Writings By Philip Hoffman

A Play of History 1987

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by Philip Hoffman

What does it mean for me and my work to have been in this place, Toronto?

Looking back over my film work of the past ten years, I see few traces of the city I choose as home… I notice my journal entries laden with references of people and places of the past.

August 19, 1979 – left Kitchener-Waterloo for the Toronto airport but first, goodbye to Mom and Babji, lying side by side. Babji speaks to me in her Polish, “Nie rozumiem…,” then, “I was think you were from the other place.” The old country is still with her, in her morning dream… to our dreams she taught us to listen… Though my work in film always deals with place, I find it odd that the place where I live and work is near-absent in my films… I question to what degree the present place where I am affects the output of the work.

January 1977 – I’m on a great flat houseboat, like the one old Roy Girdler used to ride on Lake McCullough, picking up cottagers on trips around the lake… I sit on the flat deck amidst peo­ple’s frantic legs. I’m six—I write everything down in my black book.

When have I turned the camera on Toronto?

In Somewhere Between Jalostotitlan and Encarnacion (1984), a storefront, John’s Religious Painting, Bloor and Bathurst, a glimpse through the window, through the wall, an artist copies a painting of Christ, the paintbrush careful to match the lines of the original, the camera careful, superimposing the image of the artist, a reflection on glass… Again from the same street, the same film, a procession up Bathurst Street, the Feast of Fatima, a questioning angel amongst many leaves her procession to smile for the camera. Mary is lifted up high, mingling with second-floor and third-floor rental flats. It’s an unusual day in the streets of Toronto when the grinding streetcars of commerce are replaced.

Near the end of The Road Ended at the Beach (1983), the basement on Bathurst Street is shown for a few seconds, with me, slumped over a light table editing film. At the time it seemed necessary to put myself in frame, fingers on film, trying to put an order to and make some sense of the seven years of collected film images… I learned about time, cutting film in that damp brick basement.

January 8, 1978 – I drive away from Toronto, the 401 again, passing through frozen fields, the harsh light cuts through the windshield, stops time on the road. On my way to Kitchener-Waterloo and Grampa’s funeral… in my frozen hand, the weight of my grandfather and the family procession, orderly disciplined, a strange German march echoes from his gramophone—seems like a dream.

In ?O,Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film) (1986), some camera report sheets filmed on the kitchen table in the Dovercourt Road apartment were made to look as if they were shot in Holland. The report sheets were carefully forged, made to look as if my shooting procedure is systematic, made to look like I’m in complete control, like Grandpa.

Toronto is a place to find work, to make and look at movies, to talk with people about movies. But I’m still not persuaded to shoot film in Toronto. I keep wanting to dig down into a past which is impossible to retrieve. Place is impor­tant to me but my work has little to do with concrete places like Toronto, Kitchener or even Lake McCullough. Place is where I am, what I think and feel, and for the time being I continue to find my place in Toronto.

(Originally published in A Play of History Catalogue (Toronto: Power Plant, February 1987)

Writings By Philip Hoffman

Carte Blanche 1992

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The Ontario Cinematheque is a wonderous screening facility in Toronto which ran, for many years, a program called Carte Blanche where invited filmmakers were asked to show their own work along with others who have influenced their practice. The following notes were published in the Fall 1992 guide of the Ontario Cinematheque. All notes by Philip Hoffman.

 

Philip Hoffman Carte Blanche

Films alone most often do not deeply touch me. But spending time with the maker(s), breathing their practice – this is the space in which I find real growth and sharing. In this light, I present a program that expresses an archaeology of vital meetings for me in film and life.

At the fiery 1984 Grierson Seminar, I met Peter Greenaway and his ‘anti-documentaries’  THE FALLS (1980) and its formal reverse, ACT OF GOD (1981). Where THE FALLS stages interviews, ACT OF GOD evolves through a series of `real’ interviews. Meeting Peter and seeing these two works swept away whatever realist tendencies I still had left in my work, the effect of far too many documentaries purporting objectivity, order, truth, in contemporary times of raging chaos. My response, following a sojourn to the set of Greenaway’s feature A ZED AND TWO NOUGHTS, was ?O,ZOO! (1986), a testament to making `the real’ disappear.

In 1978 the Art Gallery of Ontario hosted `Autobiography: Film/Video/ Photo’, another event that helped bring to light elements of a practice and vision which were beginning to shape my own. Jonas Mekas stood spot lit, Bolex in shopping bag beside him, DIARIES, NOTES AND SKETCHES on the screen – a passion for collecting images of the `everyday’,  every day, and a process for `living cinema.’ CASSIS (1966) by Mekas is a quiet cine-poem, a haiku of a small port in the south of France; all day and into the evening boats pass as light and color go through their changes.

Maya Deren’s work turns the program inward, her enchanted landscapes speak to the ineffable qualities of dream and trance. In AT LAND (1944), Deren finds new temporal structures through repetition, and an advanced narrative form using ‘dream-time-space’  as a beginning.

There isn’t time to have some films in this program, for example my favourite film, Chris Marker’s SANS SOLEIL, is a regular at the Cinematheque and is again this season in the Marker retrospective. Besides that there are many more works and makers that have touched me. Like MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA, NUIT ET BROUILLARD, WAVELENGTH, THRILLER, THE ANGELIC CONVERSATION, NURSING HISTORY, HIGHWAY 61, Melies, Lefebvre, Jarman, Epp, Kerr, Sternberg, Watkins, Popovich, Chambers, INSIDE SILENCE, HAMMU, HART OF LONDON, STEPS TO THE HARBOUR, McMahon, Snow, Lipsett, Lock, Cook, CHRONIQUE DE LA VIE QUOTIDIENNE, Egoyan, Cartmell, Frenkel, McGowan, SIFTED EVIDENCE, 11 X 14, NIGHT MAIL, ELEGY, THE JOURNEY, FAMILY VIEWING, THIGH LINE LYRE TRIANGULAR, MATERNAL FILIGREE, RESONANCE, THE GARDEN, GHOSTS BEFORE BREAKFAST, 1857 (FOOLS GOLD), HAWKESVILLE TO WALLEN

STEIN, CITY OF GOLD, ART OF WORLDLY WISDOM, OL’ YELLER, Hoolboom, Thorne, Rimmer, Razutis, Brown, RE: ENTRY, YOU TAKE CARE NOW, Porter, Mettler, Gronau, Leduc, Lebeau, Sanguedolce, CANAL, WILD SYNC, THE BOYS, Soul, Brakhage, Godard, Camus, Kerouac, Stein, Basho, Cage, TECHNOLOGY OF TEARS, Frank, Dewdney,Shikatani, Glass, AT PRESENT, WORK BIKE AND EAST…”

Program:

?O,ZOO! (THE MAKING OF A FICTION FILM)
Canada 1986  23 minutes
Director: Philip Hoffman

ACT OF GOD: LIGHTNING
Great Britain 1981, 25 minutes
Director: Peter Greenaway

CASSIS
USA 1966, 4 minutes (NEW PRINT)
Director: Jonas Mekas

AT LAND
USA 1944, 14 minutes
Director: Maya Deren

Canadian Premiere!

OPENING SERIES
Canada 1992 – ongoing, 10 minutes
Director: Philip Hoffman

ISIS
Canada 1988,12 minutes
Director: Stephen Butson

PLEASE DON’T STOP
Canada 1988, 5 minutes
Director: Stephanie Maxwell

Writings By Philip Hoffman

Images Talk (April 2001)

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DARKROOM

Thirty years ago Richard Kerr and I set up a darkroom in my basement and I suppose it was there where I became drawn in to photographic processes… I have always been excited by that moment when the print is put into the developer and the image begins to appear. It’s a fleeting moment when change is most focused and visible and I suppose I’ve continued to dwell in that moment of transformation in my filmmaking…

Here’s an excerpt from passing through/torn formations, it’s Christopher Dewdney’s poem Out of Control: The Quarry:

“It is a warm grey afternoon in August. You are in the country, in a deserted quarry of light grey Devonian limestone in Southeren Ontario. A powderery luminescence oscillates between the rock and sky. You feel sure that you could recognize these clouds (with their limestone texture) out of random cloud photographs from all over the world. You then lean over and pick up a flat piece of layered stone. It is a rough triangle about one foot across. Prying at the stone you find the layers come apart easily in large flat pieces. Pale grey moths are pressed between the layers of stone. Freed, they flutter up like pieces of ash caught in a dust devil. You are splashed by the other children but move not.”

(from Preditors of the Adoration, Out of Control: The Quarry by Christopher Dewdney)

In passing through/torn formations I tried to create a form that wasn’t frozen or fossilized (as film tends to do)… and this was accomplished through the layering of dialogue and collected sound, the layering of story, the repetition of story, superimposition (sometimes three separate image systems on the screen at the same time)… It is my hope that this polyphonic form allows for participation from the audience, and at the same time suggests that all family stories have several perspectives,  there is no such thing as one objective fact/truth, or way of looking at things…

I suppose this open form is taken up further in Opening Series where the audience orders twelve boxes like this and determines an order (there is an interrelated film in each box)… each time the film gets played there is a new order, and I track the various orders as the film screens… What I learn through Opening Series often finds itself in other films. For example, some sections in  Opening Series 2 and 4 find themselves in What these ashes wanted, a somewhat more narrative driven film, so it’s a kind of testing ground for images as well.

I have taken up a method borrowed from Adrienne Rich’s feminist dictum: Collect Reflect Revise. The method of collecting is spontaneous and non-scripted, in which I try to dwell in that fleeting moment, watching time through the lens…

 

GINSBERG

In the early 1980’s,  Allen Ginsburg gave a talk and led a meditation at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and recently I found the tape I had recorded and played it for Janine and she bounced it into Public’s recent Lexicon issue. Here it is.

“It is possible through mindfulness practice, to bring about some kind of orderly observation of the phenomenology of the mind and to produce a poetics. From that instant by instant recognition of thought forms comes a notion of spontaneous poetry which Jack Kerouac and Gertrude Stein practiced. And that form of poetry is a form of Oriental form that is composed on the tongue rather than on paper. It is also a Western form, a very American form. Blues and Calypso poetics were always made up on the spot. There always was a formulaic structure as in all Bardic poetics but it was dependent on the Back blues singer to get it on and make up on the spot all the rhymes and all the personal comments, all the moaning, empty bed samsara lamentations of the moment while singing. So that Tibetan poetics and American poetics are based on the spontaneous. The key to this is that you have to accept that the first thought is the best thought, you have to recognize that the mind is shapely. Because the mind has  shape, what passes through the mind is the mind’s own, so that is all in one mind, it is all linked connectedness and consequence. Observe your mind rather than force it, you will always come up with something that links to previous thought force. It is a question of trusting your own mind finally and trusting your tongue to express the mind’s fast puppet… spitting forth intelligence without embarrassment.”

 Ginsberg’s method may sound familiar to people who follow the work of Brakhage for instance, where his muse directs him through his work… I appreciate this link with the Muse but my background has directed me towards seeing it in a less individualised state. Through the 1990’s I have come to appreciate the way other people can contribute to my projects… that there is an energy around the making of a work that can create a more participatory model during the making… in other words, I get a lot of help from my loved ones, friends and assistants and I see them as part-makers of the film. Chance elements come into play when this kind of energy is set up around a project, and through people, these chance elements often help direct the film. The film is a tuning fork, resonating through people and events.

 

EDITING

Whereas the spontaneous is most connected to the shooting of films and is quite light and free the editing process has been tortuous, these collected concrete forms of memory do not always go together, and it can take a long time before I sculpt them into shape, blending story and form. Maybe this is why some of my films take five to seven years to complete.

 

FILM FARM

This process-oriented approach to making was used when I and my late partner Marian McMahon set up a Filmmaking Retreat in 1994, in Mount Forest. Participants are urged to shoot without scripts, letting the camera’s confrontation with the world be the first place to start, rather than the written word …the camera meets the world. Since hand processing facilities are available, participants can shoot and re shoot, experiment with various photo-chemical processes and gradually films surface. My motto is, if you can write a poem in a day, you can make a film in a week. Participants do not need to necessarily come to the film farm with an idea… my sense is that there is a film in everyone which can be drawn out anywhere… The atmosphere created at the film farm by the  assitants/teachers who help out every year, make it conducive to creative expression.

 

DIGITAL VS VIDEO

I am more interested in passing on a way of working than a medium(for example celluloid), in the so called digital age….

What these ashes wanted was finished on film but it makes use of high-8 and 3/4″ video, digital video, 16mm reversal, 16mm high contrast and negative, digital to film transfers and so on… It’s a way of working that I would be more concerned about losing during the corporate mandate of this millennium. Film has a beauty we should use when we need it, even if we have to get into making our own emulsion up at the film farm…

Writings By Philip Hoffman

Helsinki Trip 2004

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by Philip Hoffman

Once again I find myself in Finland, and wonder why I am drawn to this place. It isn’t only because I have good friends here from my many other visits. This is a place where I feel comfortable, and maybe the only place in my life that reminds me of my mother’s eastern European heritage. Of course, I know that Helsinki is as developed in city life as any Canadian city, yet somehow  life is more the pace I can handle, compared to that of the busy North Americans cities. I know I’m romantically naive in these judgments, but I also know that our experience of the world is always filtered through our  greatest passions, and the foundational moments. Babji (my mother’s mother) taught me how to shoot from the hip. When she took pictures, she did not look through the lens, but just kind of used her body to find the picture. This daily practice of acknowledging the body (and not only the mind), in my filmmaking, working the hand with the heart, telling stories that are both personal and, I hope, universal, finds its source in Babji’s kichen, where supper chats went on through the night, as light and dark tales of their past were laid out one by one on the kitchen table.

 

The Trip

Sami picks Janine and I up at the airport. I’ve come to do six days of workshop with Finnish filmmakers. Sami, who will be co-directing this venture, and Tuula who is hosting the workshop for her students at UIAH along with some students from the Art Academy, have organised everything just right. It is colder and darker than Canada. I look out the window and think about my friends back home who have gone to warm climates for their holidays.

After a day of organising the workshop (it starts tomorrow) I decide to take Janine out to an old haunt. Elite. The wine and food are good. This is familiar. There is an open screening next door at a local gallery, so we slide over and during the film breaks, the old gang starts appearing before my eyes, one by one: Denise, Mikko, Oliver, Seppo, Ali, Sami… they are all continuing to make and screen their work locally and internationally. There is great energy in this little basement ‘open screening’  and the work covers the range of alternative practice from documentaries that skillfully deconstruct Finnish history to campy critiques. This reminds me of the old days of the Funnel experimental Film Theatre in Toronto where people show up not knowing what will be screened but always leave entertained, stimulated and yes, a little tipsy.  What is great about it is that it’s a place to share an image, a work in progress or a brand new short, and have at times a deep exchange about some aspect. It is a place where old ideas and films get revamped and new ideas for films develop. It is polar-opposite to the ‘pitch,’ a process used nowadays in the commercial and independent film world which is less about development and the nurturing of an artistic practice and more about authoritative control through an industrial model. What I saw  in the ‘Open Screening’ follows what Jonas Mekas meant when he called the New American Cinema movement, a living cinema. In that little basement screening no one talked about not enough funding for their project. I heard nothing about problems people were having trying to secure a producer, so they could make their film. There seemed to be no yearning for the most up-to-date digital tools. This kind of film and video is more akin to the Canadian artist, Joyce Weiland, who made films on her kitchen table. In her work the stuff of everyday life surfaced.

Before sleep I remember the words of a former teacher of mine, Rick Hancox. If the Romans made films, would we be most interested in seeing their feature films, or their home movies and personal films?

A bunch of nervous students, and a couple of nervous instructors find themselves in the same room, 9am at UIAH,  on the first day of the workshop. Sami decides to put on the comical film …Mongoloid by American Avant Garde (comedian) filmmaker George Kuchar…and the ice is broken…..we come together  in laughter. Many more films are screened. There is no shortage of questions and opinions regarding the work, once again dispelling the myth that the Finns do not talk (as I was told during my first workshops at ETL in 1989 -92…I can’t imagine  Anu, Kiti, Petri, Arto, Sami, Heiki, Vesa not speaking!!!). Starting tomorrow the participants will bring in projects they are working on. Ones which they have had problems with. We will look at them together.

The projects screen one by one. People explain what they are trying to do. These projects are as deep and dark and as strongly felt, as anything I’ve seen, as anything in life. The most obvious problem surfaces time and time again. The form often does not fit the subject. Participants are forcing the passions of their life into conventional forms, handed down byHollywood…handed down by funding agencies…handed down by film schools. I understand this problem so well as I have been teaching within filmmaking institutions for years. So often, the curriculum cannot keep up with all of the needs of the students, of the industry, of the art form. At York University where I have been teaching for four years we finally decided to make a change to allow the possibility of developing innovative forms, yet maintaining the needs that students and the industry has to develop conventional narrative. In year three and four, students choose one of the following as a major: Fiction Project Workshop, Doc Project Workshop or Alternative Project Workshop.  Alternative covers everything from innovative non-linear fiction to experimental projects to hybrids of Doc, Narrative and Experimental. When the decision to change the curriculum from one that favoured fiction filmmaking to one that allowed the possibilities of three genres, one of the Professors suggested that every year we would have trouble filling the alternative class. This past autumn, we discovered that this class was the most sought after, and the only one in which students were turned down due to over enrollment.

Days are filled with screenings, talking about films…getting to know the group, what they most would like to realise…the fears we all have about making work that pushes boundaries…how much? Is it enough? Too much for an audience, and not enough for the filmmaker is the usual answer from experimentalists.

The nights are filled with meeting old friends… Seppo takes me for a ride in his new ambulance…finally he has room for all his film projectors, cameras, films and videos. He tells me about a plan to use the speaker system for a poetry/film performance…he’s already got the projector rigged through the back window, and powered up. It’s good to hear what people are up to in work and life… Denise… Mikko…gathering their new projects to show at our Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film in Canada, where we screen films in rural Ontario during the month of August  in galleries, town halls, against old barn walls, under the stars, and the grand finale at the Drive-In. I want to show Ilppo’s Routemaster there this summer …last year I ran his Plain Truth to the applause of horns honking exuberantly by  the end. Sami’s Twone would look good, sprinkled throughout the program… it would be magnificent to have some Finnish visiting filmmakers. ..let’s keep the exchange going! As well, as it will be the 10th Anniversary of my Film Farm Workshop, a 35mm hand-processed group film will screen under the stars at the drive-in.

By the last day of the workshop it appears everyone has come some distance….Sami and I  never really know how these kinds of creative workshops affect filmmaker’s work, but I like to think that they give participants confidence to go a bit further then they have already. I know it has worked that way for me. Workshops with Jean Pierre Lefebvre, theQuebequois narrative director, helped me understand that pushing narrative boundaries is as important and exciting as pushing boundaries in documentary and alternative film. During our mandatory pool game at the local  hall, I realised the worth of these visits, how they have fueled my own filmmaking  (the thankyous to Finns on the end credits of  my latest film What these ashes wanted, is as long as your arm, and proves that). And  the thankyous are mutual as the talks continue that night in the pool hall with Anu, Ilppo, Kiti, Toni,Juha, Sami, Passi…and much, much later an ecstatic Petri rolls in, plays  me a few games, we’re the last ones left, and we talk about the first workshops in `89, the old times are always the good times …what is everyone doing.? Where’s Arto, Heikki, Monday is she still shooting? We talk it out to the cold Helsinki streets, and down to the railway station…

Originally published in AVEK (Magazine for Audio-Visual Culture), Finland, Feb. 16. 2004

Film Farm Publications

Films and Fairy Dust

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by Cara Morton

It started with this dream: I am surrounded by lowing cattle. The moon is preg­nant, promising, full. The air is sweet and warm and I am on my back, floating in the grass, while Maya Deren pulls a tiny key from her mouth again and again, while Maya Deren pulls a tiny key from her mouth again and again, while Maya Deren … Kazaam! Hang on a second … this isn’t a dream at all. This is real. I am on a filmmaking retreat taught by Phil Hoffman on his enchanted property just outside Mount Forest, two blessed hours from Toronto.

I’m fully awake and it’s the end of the first day. Nine of us, eight women and one guy (“the guy on the girl’s trip”) have just spent an amazing day playing with the camera. For some it was a time for rediscovery; for others, it was that first glo­rious encounter between magician and medium, otherwise known as the Bolex. Now it’s around midnight, and we are lolling in the grass like the cattle in the field next to us, (chewing our cuds and watching Meshes of the Afternoon flicker off the outdoor cinema (the side of the barn). For me, this is film at its best: fields, forest, cattle, countryside and total immersion in the process of creation.

I went on the workshop in the first place because I hate film. I mean some­times I have to wonder, what has gotten into me? Why am 1 putting myself through this agony? I’ve spent most of my grant money. I’m in the midst of editing and I find myself asking, what is this damn film about anyway? Why am 1 making it? What am I trying to say? At this point those of you who run screaming from process-oriented work can laugh at me. I don’t plan much (what do you mean, storyboard?). I like letting things happen, letting that creative, unconscious self reign. But sooner or later that insightful (not to mention delightful) self turns on me and I’m left stranded in a dark editing suite with the corpse of my film and that evil monster self who thinks analytically, worries about money and who just doesn’t get it! So, ’round about May, that’s where I found myself. But then, the cosmic wheel turned and I went on the workshop, hoping to exorcise this critical, anti-process, monster side of myself. And it actually worked. I opened up to my instincts, started trusting myself again. (So what if this sounds like a new-age self-­help tirade. Just go with it …)

`We Are Going Home’ by Jennifer Reeves (Film Farm Retreat 1997)
`We Are Going Home’ by Jennifer Reeves (Film Farm Retreat 1997)

 

One of the first censors to go was the money-obsessed self-the self that abruptly grabs the camera away when you’re trying to have fun. Now, in the main­stream film world, this may sound subversive, or certainly weird, but if you can shoot without analyzing every detail, without worrying about money, money, money … Imagine! You can experiment! You can try things, be free with the stock! How? Cheap film! At Phil’s we were shooting the incredible Kodak 7378, at 12 bucks/100 feet. It’s cheap because it isn’t actually picture stock, but optical print stock. It’s black and white and has a varying ASA somewhere between twelve and thirty depending on how you process it. And it’s gorgeous: very high contrast with a fabulous dense grain.’

OK, so we can shoot cheap! But there’s more! Remember Polaroids? At the workshop it became clear to me that I had been missing that sense of wonder about film-that sense of playing an important role in a magical process. Thanks to Phil’s workshop I got that feeling back. How? Hand processing. It’s better than Polaroids because you can control the process of development. You can develop your film as negative or reversal, you can solarize (a personal fave), you can underdevelop, overdevelop-anything you want-in minutes. Imagine, you wander around the countryside shooting to your heart’s (and wallet’s) content and then run back to the barn, where the darkroom’s set up, and process your film. It’s hard to describe the feeling you get when you hang your film out to dry. It’s a mixture of wonder, accomplishment and connection to the medium. And all this for less than one quarter of what you usually pay.

At this point, you can tint or tone your film with other colours to get some far-out. moody effects. Most of us favoured the potassium permanganate, which eats away at the film emulsion.

 

 

The Film Farm Barn, Mount Forest
The Film Farm Barn, Mount Forest

  

Across by Cara Morton (Film Farm Retreat 1996)
Across by Cara Morton (Film Farm Retreat 1996)

    

This brings us to scratching. lmagine not only not worrying about scratches, but trying to make them! Nothing, I mean nothing, beats stomping on your film, rubbing it against trees, rolling around with it in the grass or even chewing on it like bubblegum (OK, no one actually tried that, but it would be fun, no?).

These experiences totally changed my relationship to film as a medium. I became equal to it; no, I became the master of it. No more God-like can of film handled with white kid gloves: I shot it and I can fuck with it, and if I don’t like it, well, I can re-shoot for the price of a new pack of crayons. Film can be a truly plastic medium.

Believe it or not, the mythical last day arrives. We have our final screening (most of us have actually finished a short piece) and then a discussion. Later that evening, as we are striking camp, the sun is miraculous, huge and orange, setting over the marsh. It’s so beautiful that we stare, but after five days of total immer­sion in beauty, we are saturated by it. It’s too much, all we can do is ridicule how goddamn perfect it all is.

On the way home I realize I’ve achieved more than I imagined possible. I’ve found the magic in film again. My next dream goes like this. I’m in Toronto, in a basement, surrounded by streaming ribbons of film I’ve shot and processed myself’. I start chewing on it. I chew and chew until my film turns into a tiny perfect key, until my film turns into a tiny perfect key, and I pull it from my mouth …

This article was first printed in the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers (LIFT) Newsletter. Summer 1996. 

From Landscape with Shipwreck (Toronto: Insomniac Press/Images Festival, 2001)

 

Film Farm Publications

The Independent Imaging Retreat

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by Chris Gehman

(Curated by Chris Gehman • Hanover Civic Centre, 341 10th Street, Hanover • Saturday, Sept. 20, 2003, 8:00 pm)

The Independent Imaging Retreat, now in its tenth year, was founded by Canadian filmmakers Philip Hoffman and Marian McMahon to encourage a direct, hands-on approach to filmmaking that is far removed from the costly, hierarchical and inaccessible industrial model, with its intensive division of labour into many specialized craft areas. Each summer it brings to Mount Forest, Ontario, a small group of interested filmmakers – some novices and some highly experienced – for an intensive week of shooting, processing, watching and editing, most of the action taking place in and around an old barn on Hoffman’s property.

The retreat is part of a little-recognized international movement towards what might be called an artisanal mode of filmmaking – one in which the artist works directly on every stage of a film, from shooting and editing to the processing and printing of the film stock itself. In the past, even the most solitary of avant-garde filmmakers have usually turned the processing, printing, and negative cutting of their films over to professional film laboratories whose primary products are commercial films, advertisements, television programs, etc. A new generation of filmmakers has emerged, willing to forego the predictability and standardization of industrial processes in favour of direct control of their materials, motivated by a combination of necessity and curiosity.

Economically, the existence of adventurous independent films has been dependent upon the existence of a larger commercial industry that creates a demand for products and services, and therefore keeps prices relatively low. As the commercial film industry, particularly its low-budget ranks, have shifted production away from 16mm film to digital media, the availability of 16mm film stocks and services such as processing and printing has declined, and will certainly continue to decline further.

There are several possible responses available to filmmakers who have been dependent upon this economy: follow the shifts in the larger industry and switch to video and digital media; transfer production to 35mm, with its higher attendant costs; or take control of those stages of the filmmaking process which are disappearing at the business level. (Of course, many artists will practice some combination of these basic strategies.) The Independent Imaging Retreat has played a crucial part in North America in developing and disseminating the basic skills and knowledge necessary for artists to begin taking control of those crucial elements of the filmmaking process that are becoming harder to find from commercial sources.

It would be a mistake, however, to look at the movement towards artisanal filmmaking as solely an economic response to outside factors. As is so often the case in art, internal aesthetic ideas and pressures produced effects that precede their putative economic causes: The movement was burgeoning well before the practical effects of the shifts in the commercial industry had begun to make themselves felt by independent filmmakers. The examples of individual filmmakers have been crucial in motivating new generations to take matters into their own hands: Internationally renowned artists such as Len Lye and Stan Brakhage offered inspiration in their lifelong commitments to individual, artisanal film practices. And in Canada, across a period from the mid-60s through the present, filmmakers such as Joyce Wieland, Al Razutis, Carl Brown, Gary Popovich, Barbara Sternberg, Philip Hoffman and Steven Woloshen have experimented in different ways with unconventional approaches to the film surface and image through processing, colour toning, optical printing, scratching and painting, etc.

What these filmmakers tend to share is a desire to complicate the reception of the image: In contrast to the ordinary commercial practice of creating seamless, transparent representations – illusions – through which stories are told, many independent filmmakers are committed to a more complex kind of image-making in which the projected image may be both representation and object simultaneously, or may reject representation altogether (as is the case in many of Stan Brakhage’s and Len Lye’s films). The filmmaker builds images, ideas, stories, atmospheres, while at the same time keeping the method of construction of the film, and the images which make it up, present in the viewer’sconsciousness. In this context, the nicks, scratches and inconsistencies in development which result when a roll of film is processed “spaghetti-style” in a plastic bucket are not seen as a problem – as they certainly would in making a commercial movie! – but become part of the film’s style and method.

Artists mining this cinematic vein tend also to embrace a process-oriented mode of production, in which the film’s form and subject are discovered in the course of the making, rather than following a preconceived script or plan – an art of discovery, then, not only of management and execution. This is what allows these artists to dispense with thepredictability of laboratory results, knowing that footage they hoped would be particularly good might not turn out as expected in the processing. It is a practice which embraces genuine experimentation and the discovery of a personal method of production.

Over the past ten years, more than 125 artists have attended the Independent Imaging Retreat. Its effect has been to share techniques and skills, but more importantly to encourage an approach to filmmaking which is as far removed as can be imagined from the conventional cinema whose products are so relentlessly promoted. A poetic, individual, exploratory filmmaking in which the artist is involved at every stage of the process. Perhaps for this reason, the Retreat has proved hospitable to people whose view of the world is poorly represented in the commercial media: women (there have been several weeks offered to women only), gay and lesbian people, people of colour and people from regions outside the recognized “cultural centres” of Canada and the US. This program provides a small sampling of the many films which have been made through, or under the immediate influence of, the Independent Imaging Retreat. Because the participants share basic materials and techniques during the week they are working together, there are often similarities in the surface appearances of the works; but each artist has gone on to apply these techniques and skills in a different way.

Chris Gehman is an independent filmmaker, film and video programmer and critic. He is currently the Artistic Director of the Images Festival in Toronto (www.imagesfestival.com).

 

PHIL’S FILM FARM
John Porter, Canada • 16mm b&w 10 min. 2002
Canada’s most prolific filmmaker, John Porter has made more than 300 short films, mostly in Super-8. He has also been documenting Toronto’s independent film scene in still photographs for about thirty years. This film brings these two practices together, creating a poetic document of the 2002 Retreat in which the filmmakers and the setting are laminated in gorgeous black-and-white in-camera multiple exposures. (The film may be shown either silent or with sound, depending upon the circumstances.)

MINUS
Chris Chong, Canada • 16mm b&w 3 min. 1999
Minus is a hand-processed, unedited stream of movements. After subtracting most of what took place before the camera, what isleft is remnants of light and rhythm, traces of a body in motion. This was Chong’s first 16mm film, and demonstrates the kinds of rich results that can be obtained from simple, highly restricted means and techniques.

HARDWOOD PROCESS
David Gatten, USA • 16mm colour silent 14 min. 1997
“A history of scarred surfaces, an inquiry, and an imagining: For the marks we see and the marks we make, for the languages we can read and for those we are trying to learn.Reproduced by hand on an old contact printer resulting in individual, unique release prints.” (David Gatten)

DANDELIONS
Dawn Wilkinson, Canada • 16mm b&w 9 min. 1997
“Lyrical and full of mirth, this filmmaker wonders out loud in her first film: How do I make myself at home in a landscape made foreign to me? Wilkinson looks at her self – black – and ponders in the white landscape called Canada how can she ‘enjoy the flowers’ as she cartwheels with great panache through fields of them. What kind of relationship to the land can she have in a place where she sees herself but where others constantly ask: Where are you from? Wilkinson’s existence vis-a-vis the land seems to lie somewhere in between the extreme long shots and the close ups that make up the film, giving at once the feelings of intimacy and estrangement.” (Marian McMahon)

SWELL
Carolynne Hew, Canada • 16mm b&w/colour 5 min. 1998
Carolynne Hew’s Swell extends the techniques used at the Retreat by reworking her film footage in the digital realm. The result is a layered, oceanic embodiment of physical energy and desire.

THE SHAPE OF THE GAZE
Ma’ia Cybelle Carpenter, USA 16mm colour 7 min. 2000
Chicago-based filmmaker Ma’ia Carpenter acknowledges the pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer as a great inspiration. The Shape of the Gaze is a sort of manifesto of radical queer filmmaking in which Carpenter implicates the viewer in the exchange of looks between the filmmaker and her “butch” subjects, disrupting the usual filmmaker­subject-viewer triad through interventions in colour and film surface.

PASSING THROUGH
Karyn Sandlos, Canada • video 12 min. 1998
Since participating in the Retreat in 1998, Sandlos has been one of its main organizers most years, and has also co-edited a book, Landscape With Shipwreck, about the films of Philip Hoffman. Passing Through develops a more explicit narrative line than most of these films, creating a lovely journal of a short stay in a small, Ontario town during which nothing seems to fit properly.

GLINT
Eve Heller, USA • 16mm b&w silent 5 min. 2003
Shot in the Saugeen River using a special underwater housing, Glint is a film-poem of the utmost subtlety and finesse, in which images emerge from black only to vanish again…

Related programming: Be sure to see Deirdre Logue’s installation Enlightened Nonsense: 10 Short Performance Films About Repetition and Repetition, a film series shot over the course of several years at the Independent Imaging Retreat. This work is installed at the Durham Art Gallery from Aug. 21 to Sept. 28. Address: 251 George St., DurhamTelephone: 519.369.3692 • Web: www.durhamart.on.ca

Hours: Tuesday-Friday, 12-5; Saturday-Sunday, 1-4