vulture & Film Farm Films (by Maïa Cybelle Carpenter & Markus Maicher). Program curated by Brett Kashmere: Continue reading MIXING UP THE MEDICINE: FILM FARM 30TH ANNIVERSARY
The Gāyatrī mantra of the Ṛigveda sets-up the entire short film: it is the mantra itself that creates the atmosphere of darkness, followed by the first creation: the tree, which contains the identity of darkness as if it were its visible matter…. (see below) “Deep 1” Ribalta Film Fest Review
“Philip Hoffman is a precious resource, one of the few contemporary filmmakers whose work provides a bridge to the classical themes of death, diaspora, memory, and, finally, transcendence. As Landscape With Shipwreck makes clear, Hoffman explores these most Canadian of themes without grandiosity; instead they emerge from stories held close to the ground, the family, and personal experience, whether at home or in very unfamiliar places indeed. And he does so through a constant renovation of method that enriches the viewers’ ability to grasp how film form contains and conditions meaning. This is just the sort of human voice articulated through film that we desperately need amidst the thunder of corporate media in all forms.” (“Landscape with Shipwreck: 1st Person Cinema and the Films of Philip Hoffman”, Insomniac Press/Images Festival 2001)
“ 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 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.”
“Communication takes a poetic turn in Kokora is for Heart. Originating as a performance piece, the director, Phil Hoffman, screened segments of this film in a random order selected by the audience (Opening Series 3). Accompanying this was the sound poetry of Gerry Shikatani. From this process the film has found its organic and final structure.” (TIFF Program, 1999)
Released a decade before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Hoffman subtly questions how guests on Indigenous land, himself included, have come here to live. The film’s political-historical observations should feel like an anarchronism today…The lack of political progress regarding the Calls to Action, the effects and affects of migration, the struggles with the legal system, the impact of all of this on mental health and on future generations, are some of the pressing contemporary issues resonating today in All Fall Down.
Michael Sicinski on `All Fall Down’
“passing through/torn formations accomplishes a multi-faceted experience for the viewer—it is a poetic document of Family, for instance—but Philip Hoffman’s editing throughout is true to thought process, tracks visual theme as the mind tracks shape, makes melody of noise and words as the mind recalls sound.”
`passing through/torn formations’ preview
Hoffman’s sixth film in ten years, passing through/torn formations is a generational saga laid over three picture rolls that rejoins in its symphonic montage the broken remnants of a family separated by war, disease, madness and migration. Begun in darkness with an extract from Christopher Dewdney’s Predators of the Adoration, the poet narrates the story of ‘you,’ a child who explores an abandoned limestone quarry….The film’s theme of reconciliation begins with death’s media/tion—and moves its broken signifiers together in the film’s central image, ‘the corner mirror,’ two mirrored rectangles stacked at right angles. This looking glass offers a ‘true reflection,’ not the reversed image of the usual mirror but the objectified stare of the Other. When Rimbaud announces ‘I am another’ he does so in a gesture that unites traveller and teller, confirming his status within the story while continuing to tell it. It is the absence of this distance, this doubling that leads the Czech side of the family to fatality.
complete Cinema Canada review by Mike Hoolboom on `passing through/torn formations’ Continue reading Deep 1 @ Simon Fraser University, B.C. & Ribalta Fest, Italy (Review)
Saugeen First Nations Workshop 2018
Lessons in Process in Berlinale 2012
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
Philip Hoffman and Eva Kolcze will be conducting a touring process cinema workshop based on the Film Farm, one in Northern Ontario and one in London in association with the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto.
“Process Cinema explores a creative tradition in alternative filmmaking that is improvisational and interactive. Through this process-driven methodology, the screenplay as governing document is replaced by a fluid integration of writing, shooting and editing, not necessarily in that order.This way of working ‘through’ process has a comparative body of work in music, through jazz, in art, through ‘action painting’, in the performative aspects of the sketchbook or through ‘spontaneous prose’ in beat poetry.”
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
