Category Archives: Process Cinema

Film Farm Brasil 2023: Phytogram by Moira Lacowicz

Moira at Film Farm Brasil
`Colt' `Deep 1′ (Frame Enlargement)

Flower Power & the Language of Animals @ Strangloscope  here

Hoffman & artist Tetsuya Maruyama @ Strangloscope
The Dynamite Duo Claudiá & Rafael
Sao Paulo Lab 2023 with Rodrigo Sousa

Rivers of Time: Films by Hoffman @ Strangloscope here

`river’ (Frame Enlargement) underwater Saugeen River 1989
Marcel Beltran & Philip Hoffman at Brasil Film Beach Farm Performance, Strangloscope Fest

*Hoffman Brasil 2023 Tour assisted  by the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Media Arts Travel Grant Program

Film Farm Collective visits Analogue Farm in U.K. (2019)

Film Farm at Analogue Farm’s 1st Public Screening in Manchester UK.

Vulture Aesthetics  by Hoffman here

`vulture’ (film processed with oregano)

Flowers #3 (Kissed by the Sun)

Flowers #3 (Kissed by the Sun)   10 min., 35mm photogram to HDV, Sil., 2023.    By Philip Hoffman in collaboration with Alexander Granger and Jason O’Hara

These motion picture photograms were initiated through a five hour plunge into the darkroom; remembering the Galician celebration of flowers on the road in Baiona, near Vigo in 2019, here too we made a floral carpet of photograms. –P.Hoffman

A Procession of herbs “emerge in all their structures, colors and epidermis. The motion picture itself becomes a plant which delicately stretches petioles and petals.” – Séance #3-Sentir Comme une Plante, Muséum National d’Histoire naturelle, Paris.

Flowers #3 by Philip Hoffman (Kissed by the Sun)

 

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

Working with Plants in the Time of Covid 2020

cookin’ in Vulture
`Green’ Developing Process for 3378 film

Phytogram-making Recipe

Saugeen First Nations Takes On Film

Saugeen First Nations Workshop 2018

Drive-In Screening of Thunder Rolling Home by Sharon Isaac and Kelsey Diamond 2019

Film Farm On the Road at Aberystwyth University, Wales 2019

Drying Film
Kim Knowles and Deirdre Logue foraging
Flower Process Prep

Film Farm on the Road, Analogue Farm, Rochdale UK 2019

Film Farm at Analogue Farm’s 1st Public Screening
Analogue Farm 2019

 

Under the Strawberry Sun, Workshop by Organic Film Workshop at Silent Green by Dagie Brundhert & Philip Hoffman, Berlin 2019

Poster & Workshop Group Film

Film Farm On the Road at S8 Mostra de Cinema Periférico 2018

`GREEN’ Processing with Coffee & Flowers

‘GREEN’ Processing_Recipes 

Making `Green’ Developer

 

Making Walnut Toner

 

Cine en Preceso, Internacional de Cine y Television, at San Antonio de Los Banos in Cuba 2010-2018

Lecciones en Proceso (16mm to HDV, 30 min., 2012)

Spanish/English

Lessons in Process in Berlinale 2012

 

Cine en Proceso 2016

 

Cine en Proceso 2016
Cine en Proceso 2017

 

Process Cinema, York University Guest: Eva Kolcze

 

Process Cinema University of Calgary 2018

 

Workshop Group Film by Hunter

 

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

Read More…

 

Waterloo-born filmmaker receives Governor General’s Award

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 between sprocket holes.

“That’s sort of the heart of my approach,” said the 60-year-old Waterloo native on Thursday morning before addressing his film class at York University in Toronto.

“I collect images over a long period of time. Sometimes I don’t even know what I’m going to do with them.”

But his running cinematic journal is constant and fluid. He fills its ethereal pages with audio, video, film and photographs. He is a pack rat of cinematic potential.

That’s why, after 38 years and as many as 30 projects, he has been honoured with a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts for career achievement.

He’ll receive a medallion at Rideau Hall on March 23. The cash prize is $25,000.

He found out in November. He kept quiet and kept busy, like when he was a teen working the kill line at the family meat plant on Maple Street in Kitchener.

The award was officially announced on Monday.

“I got a lot of congrats from my hockey pals,” said Hoffman, who still plays in a Yorkdale men’s league that often uses the ice at the remnants of old Maple Leaf Gardens.

Hockey and hybrid filmmaking. That’s become the faceoff forté for Hoffman, a long-ago junior puck-chaser for the Waterloo Siskins and Hespeler Shamrocks.

Meshing a digital present with an acetate past still carries aesthetic appeal.

“I see it in my classes,” he said. “People are nuts about still handling celluloid.”

Keeping film alive. Is that his hand-processed crusade? Is that why he runs a “film farm” retreat for experimental filmmakers each summer at his country home in Mount Forest?

“Film is from the past,” he said. “I want to see how it can live in the present.”

The past lives in Hoffman’s first film, “On the Pond.” How long ago? It was 1978.

He pulled his parents, Phil and Susan, and triplet older sisters — identical Colleen and Frannie, plus fraternal Philomene — into his room in their Bridgeport Road home.

He played a slide show of family memories he had chronicled and tape-recorded the audio of their reactions. There was a lot of artistic talent huddled in that room, providing the running commentary to his modest nine-minute epic on the boy’s birthday.

Colleen and Frannie, now living in Oakville and Florida, respectively, started a modelling agency in town. They appeared in TV commercials too, selling washers and dryers and Doublemint chewing gum. And Philomene, now a Toronto-based folksinger, went on to teach music.

Hoffman’s mom Susan was a painter, too. She also crafted beautiful driftwood sculptures at their cottage near Owen Sound. Hoffman used to boat his mom across the McCullough Lake waters so she could scoop up driftwood for her creations.

Hoffman combined his family’s ad-libbed soundtrack with film footage he shot of his cousin Bradley skating on a frozen lake by the cottage.

The 16-mm shortie was the developing story of Hoffman’s young Waterloo life, processed in the dark room he set up in the family basement.

“I kind of started doing it because photography was a way I could express myself,” he said. “I had three sisters. They sort of ran the show. They were pretty dominant as a trio. I’d just kind of do photography and go fishing and get out of the commotion.”

He studied literature at Wilfrid Laurier. He took visual arts at Sheridan College.

He liked beat poetry, too. The spontaneity spoke to his freestyle creative soul.

“Spontaneity is really my process,” he said. “It’s like collecting things spontaneously, and then carving those moments into films.”

Not all those moments are comforting. Intense grief has pierced his work, too.

Twenty years ago, his partner Marian, a writer, died suddenly during a cancer biopsy operation. The 55-minute “What these Ashes Wanted,” an exploration of mortality, was his anguished artistic response to her loss.

“Working on the film was a place to go during that grieving period,” he said. “It was a comfortable place within the pain. I felt safe there.”

Two years after Marian’s death, Hoffman met Janine, a film teacher. They are now married and Hoffman has a 24-year-old stepdaughter in Jessie.

Janine co-wrote his 55-minute feature “All Fall Down” from 2009.

Hoffman’s latest film, a collaboration with Toronto-based filmmaker Eva Kolcze, explores the grounds of Montreal’s Expo 67. The scavenger was at work again. He found some cast-aside Super 8 film on the event in a library and etched it into their film.

“There’s a type of filmmaking within independent film called ‘found footage’ filmmaking,” he said. “You’re recycling images.”

But you’re framing them in fresh ways, combining old and new methods.

“I try to make films that deal with memory,” Hoffman said. “And how history is remembered.”

Originally published here.