All posts by Phil Hoffman

Jordan Cronk on “Vulture”

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 16mm footage shot on Hoffman’s farm in Mount Forest, Ontario that the filmmaker then photochemically processed with natural plant and flower pigments, resulting in a roughhewn, multivalent display of richly tinted and textured celluloid. To hear Hoffman tell it, his analog approach to cinema is part and parcel of a universal cycle of survival and sustainability; like a vulture, his film feasts on the very elements of its production, finding aesthetic nutrients in its every ingredient.

Following a brief shot of Homer Watson’s turn-of-the-20th-century landscape painting The Flood Gate, the film commences with a procession of slow, Wavelength-esque zooms towards a variety of animal life (pigs, horses, cows, goats, chickens) before shifting focus to take in the larger ecosystem surrounding the farm fauna: overhead, birds of prey patiently circle, while in the distance, tractors plow the land and farmers work the fields. The film’s landscape imagery occasionally recalls Nicolas Rey’s autrement, la Molussie (2012) or the work of the late Peter Hutton, though the quietly swelling audio frequencies—the sound is credited to Luca Santilli and Clint Enns, with a mix by experimental filmmaker Isiah Medina (88:88)—portend something far less comforting. Like Wilcox, vulture forgoes direct sound; instead, the distant din of fluttering distortion echoes across the stereo field like helicopter blades on the horizon, with the occasional sample of a young boy’s voice emerging from the void as if summoned from another dimension. Before long, those unassuming establishing shots (which appear mostly untouched by any post-production techniques) give way to a series of colour montages that cut together heavily treated images of plant, animal, and human life from around the farm—an idyllic vision disrupted by the subliminal threat of violence and industrialization. Rather than let the threat loom, Hoffman reworks a selection of this same material for a bracing coda in which the previously placid imagery is subjected to a caustic combination of rapid edits and atonal musical flourishes. (Unsurprisingly, both the sound and edit for this section is credited to Medina.) “Vultures live together, and they don’t fight, they help each other,” the boy says at one point—a perfectly succinct bit of childlike wisdom for a world in which pleasure and peril often go hand in hand.

“for its beauty, the perfection of the relationship between sound and image, its radical concept of cinematographic time, the sophistication of the montage, but above all, for its non-negotiable commitment to the essence of cinema – the image in time – and the didactic and community context that it generates around its work”    Fugas International Jury Award from Haden Guest, director of the Harvard Film Archive, Dora García, artist and filmmaker, and Raúl Camargo, director of the Valdivia International Film Festival (Chile)

`vulture’ website Here

Hoffman’s film `vulture’ was awarded the Best Film Award (over 45 min) by the Fugas International Competition Jury at Documenta Madrid 2020. Thanks to Isiah Medina (Editing & Sound Mix), Luca Santilli (Sound) and his band Kennedy (Music),  Dagie Brundert, Ricardo Leite,, Franci Duran, Clint Enns, Dennis Day, Zac Goldkind, Janine Marchessault and The Ontario Arts Council.

Kim Knowles on “vulture”:

“Hoffman’s vulture” a beautiful and contemplative study of interspecies co-existence, where farm animals roam freely and the camera patiently observes their various interactions. Shot on 16mm film and processed with plants and flowers, it’s also an exercise in eco-sensitivity on so many levels.” Edinburgh International Film Festival, Blackbox 

“The marks and blemishes on the surface of the film that result from hand- processing draw attention to both the mediating presence of the material and the hand of the artist in crafting a visual record of the place. Sections of the film were processed and tinted with a variety of flowers, fruits and plants from around the farm – magnolia, hyachinth, hydrangea, daffodil, rhododendron, pond algae, lilac, oregano, comfrey, rose, mint, goldenrod, hosta buds, wild garlic seeds, tansy, aster, echinacea, sunflower, and walnut. From this perspective vulture is more than just a visual appreciation of the land; it is a complex material engagement with an eco-system that draws out the expressive possibilities of living things beyond conventional forms of representation. Over a shot of a flying bird, we hear a child relating fragments of information about vultures and their hunting habits. `Vultures live together, and they don’t fight, they help each other’, says the child. `I didn’t know that’, replies Hoffman. Behind this simple exchange lie multiple layers of signification that testify to the intellectual and spiritual depth of the film, and, at the same time, point towards a philosophy of collective nurturing that quietly runs under the surface of the Independent Imaging Retreat (Film Farm).” Excerpt from “From Chapter 4, From Film Lab to Film Farm by Kim Knowles from her book Experimental Film and Photo Chemical Practices

Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices by Kim Knowles (cover image by Franci Duran)

order book Here

In Conversation: Philip Hoffman & Charlie Egleston at Forest City Film Festival Here

Read Review by Andrew Robertson, Edinburgh International Film Festival Here

Read review by Mónica Delgado Desisit Film Here

ending series (2020-2024)

ending series 1-4 (2020-2024)The 16mm film was shot and partly hand-processed with plants and flowers by Hoffman, and digitally edited by Isiah Medina.

endings (2023, 9 min., Canada) by Philip Hoffman and Isiah Medina

`For creating a layered and complex work that brings to the screen the essential elements of natural life in parallel with the very essence of cinema: Image, Sound (and its absence) Editing. The apparent simplicity of the image is contrasted with an intricate, associative, rollercoaster-like editing punctuated by the presence and absence of sound.  Some of the original 16mm footage is developed by hand using the photochemical properties of plants—oregano, walnuts, and other indigenous plants—that infuse the film with a tactile materiality that reverberates in the viewer and awakens memory at its most intimate level. This analog process is reworked through digital interventions by Isiah Medina, whose contribution expands the film’s organic origins, creating a necessary counterpoint. This alchemical operation unfolds so that the images we see on the screen – the endings of plants, the endings of flowers – are the elements that give life to the film itself, dragging the viewer into a hypnotic and visceral experience.’ – Ribalta Film Festival, Italy 2025 Award: Best Director(s)

` Trees, farm fields with animal livestock, ponds and plants, and natural artefacts disappear in the flicker effect of landscape compositions where sweeping branches carve moving structures into the viewer’s memory, and the transformations of living image threads remind us of the inexhaustible visual exuberance of meadows and grain.’                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Ribalta Film Festival, Italy 2025  (Award, Best Director(s)                          Prismatic Ground, NY 2025                                                                      Shapeshifter Cinema, Oakland (endings) 2024                                                  Simon Fraser University, Vancouver (endings) 2024                                      Adhoc, Innis College Toronto, (endings) 2024                                                    La Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión (EICTV) 2023, Cuba Strangloscope Festival, Brasil (endings)2023                                                      Images Festival, Toronto  (ending 2) 2021                                                              Crossroads, San Francisco Cinematheque (ending 2) 2021                        Jihlava Documentary Film Festival, Facinations, (ending 2)  2020

ending Series:

endings                                                                                                                      HDV/Orig 16mm, sound,9:00 min., 2024                                                            (co-maker Isiah Medina)

ending  2                                                                                                                                   HDV/Orig 16mm, sil.,3:51 min., 2020                                                                       (co-maker Isiah Medina)

ending 1                                                                                                                       HDV/Orig 16mm, sound, 4:36 min., 2022                                                               (co-maker Isiah Medina)

ending 3                                                                                                                       HDV/Orig 16mm, sil., 3:28 min., 2022                                                                     (co-maker Isiah Medina)

ending 4                                                                                                                      HDV/Orig 16mm, sil.,2:33 min., 2022                                                                      (co-maker Isiah Medina)

ending 1 & endings

 

 

 

workshops, info, recipes, videos, photos…

Process Cinema Workshop EICTV 2023

Photos: Saugeen Takes on Film Workshops 2018 & 2019 here

Excerpts from Saugeen Takes On Film Workshop here

Filmmakers: Kelsey Diamond, Sharon Isaac, Natalka Pucan, Jennifer Kewageshig, Emily Kewageshig, Taylor Cameron

 

`Green’ Developing Process for 3378 film

Continue reading workshops, info, recipes, videos, photos…

Lux Workshop 2015

filmfarm_outdoorscreening

Philip Hoffman has been developing a hands-on, artisanal approach to filmmaking for more than 20 years in Canada at his summer workshop, the `Independent Imaging Retreat’ or `Film Farm’. Now this process-oriented workshop comes to the UK with a 2-day intensive project, ‘the Lux Film Farm’ hosted by Lux and the Double Negative Dark Room in proximity to the Hackney Marshes in East London.

Read more at LUX’s site for PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE: LUX FILM FARM A Hand Processing Film Workshop with Philip Hoffman, 20-21 June 2015

Mike Hoolboom reviews Phil Hoffman’s Aged (2014)

“Who has not marveled at the triumph of slow motion? At the end of every sporting event the decisive moments of the past hours float past in a dreamy montage, everything slowed to a crawl, as if it had occurred days, even years ago, part of a past that seems already out of reach, filled with bygone charms. The pages of Vimeo and YouTube have delivered us to a global tidal wave of slow motion magics, where heroines of time are caught in the full thrall of their secret erotic life, their faces filled with hand grenade smiles and arms stretch beyond the horizon with an inflated heroism. In his too familiar essay, Walter Benjamin wrote about slow motion as a way to defeat capitalism. He imagined that hidden within our everyday gestures were a cornucopia of unseen resistances, that our bodies performed a micro-politics of nay saying that the camera would at last reveal. But the digital revolution appears to have unveiled these once hidden intervals as another area of over exposure, bent beneath the first law of digital culture: that everything should be visible, bright, clear, tagged, identifiable. The surveillance state insists: there is no outside.”

Read the full article here.

link to film and reviews