Category Archives: Writings About Philip 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

FROM THE STORAGE LOFT: CELLULOID DIARY (1986)

by Grecia A. Sarigianni, Salsomaggiore 1986

We met Philip Hoffman at Salsomaggiore Festival. He is a Canadian director, who at present also teaches cinema, photography and video at Sheridan College Media Arts Department, Oakville Ontario. He is a graduate in Media Studies and is 30 years old. He brings Europe with him as his father is German and his mother is Polish (but from Czechoslovakia). Hoffman found himself in the cinematographic art at a young age, not through heritage (he is the first filmmaker in his family) but through… I don’t knowl Where do artists come from? Hoffman had a photographic darkroom when he was 14, and, since then, he took pictures and shot autobiographical movies which later found a place in his diaristic productions. He has won awards in Canadian and American Festivals and he has participated at Edinburgh and Rotterdam Festivals.

How has he come to Salsomaggiore Film Festival in Italy? It is because Adriano Apra, Salso’s Festival Director, saw Hoffman’s films in Rotterdam and was so impressed with his work that Apra decided to invite Hoffman to Italy. Adriano Apra depicted below with Bernardo Bertolucci in Salso Film Festival 1981:

Adriano Aprà, a sinistra, con Bernardo Bertolucci a Salsomaggiore Terme, 1981

Philip Hoffman arrived in Salso with five short films, all out of competition: On the PondThe Road Ended at the BeachSomewhere Between Jalostotitlan and Encarnacion?O,ZOO!(The Makinq of a Fiction Film) and passing through/torn formations 

Usually the films of the Canadian Director are inspired by family life or what is happening around him; they are diaristic films and he works in a direct and uncomplicated way. “I usually do not use a script in preperation for a film. Scripts can create limits.” he says, “I take pictures and shoot films, record sound, during my travels. Each film comes to light (evolves) slowly, instinctively.”

The Road Ended at the Beach  is born of 7 years (’76 – ’83) of intermittent travel through Canada and was inspired by the author of On the Road, Jack Kerouac and his idea of `spontaneous prose’. The film deals with, amongst other things, the filmmaker’s delusions and realizations with respect to living the Kerouac myth.

Hoffman filming Jim McMurry & Jack on Burgeo beach, Newfoundland forThe Road Ended at the Beach 1983.

The film passing through/torn formations tells the personal story of the director’s mother and of her family. It gathers documents about life in Czechoslovakia and musical excerpts from recordings of the family collection, everything composed in 43 minutes. To Greek people it has been a pleasant surprize, because one can hear an excerpt composed by Manos Hatzidakis, the popular “Never on a Sunday”. Hoffman’s uncle plays the piece in the film on accordian.

Hoffman’s participation at Salsomaggiore Festival has been a sucess. Journalists requested to show his films again, and during the last day, the request was accepted by the festival organizers.

What’s Hoffman’s opinion of the Festival?

“I’m pleased. This festival is organized well… the atmosphere allows the possibility to meet people, to talk, to exchange ideas. That is very important to me.”

At Rupchand’s cabin, the Road Ended at the Beach 1983

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…

 

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

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.

Café Ex: The Films of Philip Hoffman

On Thursday December 10, 2015, Philip Hoffman will attend a screening of some of his work as part of Café Ex:

Inaugurated in 1998, the eighteenth season of this ongoing visiting artist series presents artist-curated evenings of independent experimental film and video in the intimate atmosphere of Club SAW. Once again, the series features Canadian experimental cinema, with guest filmmakers presenting their work and engaging in extensive discussions with audience members for a “pay-what-you-can” admission.

More information can be found at the Canadian Film Institute’s website.

PHILIP HOFFMAN: Canadian Independent Filmmaker Comes to Perth For Solo Screening!

image002

Toronto based filmmaker Philip Hoffman has been making independent films for twenty years and his celebrated works have been seen by festival audiences around the world. Philip is coming to Australia to screen his latest work at the Sydney Film Festival in June and on the way he is stopping off in Perth to present a selection of his short films at the Film and Television Institute.

The films of Philip Hoffman cannot be situated within any specific genre of film making, instead we see a remarkable shift between styles that incorporate the home movie, the idiosyncratic documentary, and the formalist exploration of the permutations of sound and image. Hoffman’s cinema is an intensely subjective one, often employing an emotional voice-over to colour the residual traces of the lost and found seen in faded family snapshots, grainy archival 16mm and standard 8 memories. Other works share a lyrical thread in the mode of Stan Brakhage with their graphic and rhythmic effects that engage a viewers perception in a complex dialectical relationship between the techniques of cinema and the physiology and psychology of vision. The poetic intention running through many of Hoffman’s images, from the shadowy black and white portrait of a dying grandmother in passing through / torn formations to the ephemeral floating rhythm of a fragmentedcityscape in Chimera can be understood in part as a desire to reconstitute impressions of memory – (the filmmaker enters) “the work of making ghosts of the past for the future.” (SamLandels)

Denoting the family as source and stage of inspiration, Hoffman’s gracious archaeology is haunted by death, the absent centre in much of his diary practice a meditation on mortality and its representation. His restless navigation’s are invariably followed by months of tortuous editing as history is strained through its own image, recalling Derrida’s dictum thateverything begins with reproduction. Hoffman’s delicately enacted shaping of his own past is at once poetry, pastiche, and proclamation, a resounding affirmation of all that is well with independent cinema today. (Mike Hoolboom, Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film In Canada, 1997).

Program: riverpassing through/torn formationsKitchener-BerlinChimera

Special Matinee Screening attended by film maker Phillip Hoffman on Sunday May 31st, 1998, 5.30 pm at the Film and Television Institute, 92 Adelaide St. Fremantle.

Tickets $7 full or $5 conc/members. Please note change of date!

For all enquiries please contact Sam Landels on 9328 2808 or the FTI on 9335 1055.

This event is proudly sponsored by Imago Multimedia Centre and The Film and Television Institute.