Landscape with Shipwreck: First Person Cinema and the Films of Philip Hoffman ed. Hoolboom and Sandlos Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2001

by Chris Gehman

At the beginning of cinema’s second century, it’s instructive to remember how recently proclamations of the “death of the avant-garde’* (or “experimental film,” or “fringe film”) were a staple for filmwatchers concerned with develop­ments outside the realms of commercial and art-house production (e.g., Chicago Reader critic Fred Camper, and Village Voice critic J. Hoberman). This imminent demise was seen as arising from an exhaustion of creative possibilities, and, for Camper in particular, the domestication of a formerly independent and vital movement. In a 1989 statement, Camper wrote that

What began as an anarchic movement with a singular mis­sion-that of changing the viewers’ sensibilities and thereby changing the world-is now a fragmented col­lection of “schools.” The phrases “avant-garde film” and “experimental film” no longer denote works that break new cinematic ground; rather, they name a style, almost a genre, which has its own set of defining characteristics. (32)

Towards the end of the 1980s this position seemed to solidify into a consen­sus, and filmmakers too joined the chorus. Australia’s Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, for example, toured with a film performance in which they called them­selves “the last filmmakers,” and Jean-Luc Godard’s television series Histoire(s) du cinema was markedly elegiac in tone. Among many artists who shifted their production mostly or entirely away from film (Jordan Belson, Malcolm Le Grice, AI Razutis), American independent Jon Jost “defected” to digital video-and to Europe. There he became an outspoken critic of what he sees as an irrational fetishization of the medium and a hypocritical institutional/critical environment surrounding experimental film.

During the late 80s and early 90s there were genuine signs that experimental film was in trouble. To begin with, many influential independent filmmakers have died over the past two decades. These include Andy Warhol, Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits, Marjorie Keller, Harry Smith, Warren Sonhert, Joyce Wieland, Sidney Peterson, and Kurt Kren. From the mid-80s through the early 90s, most of the institutions that supported artists’ work in film, among them Anthology Film Archives and the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, the Canadian Film-makers Distribution Centre, the London Filmmakers Coop and Canyon Cinema, experi­enced crises caused by fractures and antagonism between different factions. Thesecrises were exacerbated by dwindling state support and often haphazard adminis­trative practices. In Toronto, the 1989 International Experimental Film Congress, which was organized partly to respond to the idea that experimental film was no longer a vital force, became the site and the subject of heated debates that broke down roughly along generational lines. A younger, more politically oriented group of artists, theorists and programmers attacked what they saw as an outmoded and elitist conception of the “avant-garde,” particularly a purist formalism, that had dominated experimental film production and deformed its discourse. Further, some major art galleries (such as the National Gallery of Canada and Art Gallery of Ontario) appear to have dropped film programming and acquisition from their regular activities, while others have cut them back to almost nothing. Acquisitions of film prints by libraries and educational institutions, once a small but important source of income for at least the better-known filmmakers, have all but ceased and a revival of the practice seems very unlikely. And it is probably true that an increasingly academic environment made for a less vital film culture, at least for a particular segment of the field, and for a particular period of time.

But experimental film did not die. Many of the key institutions mentioned above have recovered their stability over the past several years, and new venues for the exhibition of artists’ film have sprung up. Sonic of these have been short­lived, while others have settled in for a long life. Critical writing on film is almost completely absent from general-interest art journals and magazines, but there are specialized journals that publish serious writing on film. A heartening range of books has appeared over the past several years, including Scott MacDonald’s three-volume collection of interviews with filmmakers, A Critical Cinema. Ultimately, however, it can only be the healthy, prickly condition of filmmaking itself that proves these proclamations of death to have been premature. What threatens the form now is less a matter of creative exhaustion than the possibility that the basic tools, materials and services needed to complete a film may disap­pear as the commercial industry turns entirely towards digital media.

What has perhaps passed away is a certain image of the artist as romantic, visionary hero, and an allegiance to large-scale, often highly purist, abstract mod­els of making. Some very interesting film artists of the past two decades (e.g., Jennifer Reeves, Philip Hoffman) have moved between styles and genres in a way that might have seemed confusing or incoherent to an earlier generation.

The characteristic elements of these films are likely to be philosophical, thematic, and personal, unlike the formal “signature style” or clear progression of artistic devel­opment that made up the work of respectable artists in earlier decades.

There has, then, been a significant shift since the “heroic” period of the avant-garde that found its critical spokesman in P. Adams Sitney, and its bible in Visionary Film: The American Avant-garde 1943-1978 (second edition 1979). This book became a flash point for much of the debate over the canonization of exper­imental film. Jason Boughtonsummarizes the critical point of view:

[Sitney’s] book acts and continues to be used as a lexi­con of alternative filmmaking practice, not only for the years it claims, but more generally, forward and back­wards in history. Like all written history it is not just a locus of memory but also a kind of sleep capsule axis of active, official forgetting … The problem is the form history comes in [in] Visionary Film-the confusion of memory and forgetting, the thinly veiled claims of com­pleteness and simple reportage. When one speaks of the Avant-Garde, is it just one era, a single group of friends, great men, a unified field that is referred to? Is avant-garde anidea or an identity? Is it (lead, and if not, can we finally let it die, and take with it a back-breaking debt to every other logocentric, exclusionary Avant-Garde…? (7)

Boughton quarrels with Sitney’s tendency to categorize makers and their works according to major art-historical movements, and takes issue with the staunchly apolitical nature of Sitney’s analysis. He accuses Sitney, for example, of ignoring the radical socialism of Ken Jacobs in his discussion of Jacobs’s works. Boughton points out that Maya Deren is the only woman filmmaker given serious consideration in Visionary Film, while Marie Menken is treated primarily as an influence on male filmmakers, and as the wife of Willard Maas. Boughton con­cludes that “[t]he exclusion of politics in Visionary Film would almost be comfort­ing, an easy resting place, were its politics not so visibly exclusionary” (6).

The “death” that the critics of the 80s predicted, then, was perhaps not the death of the experimental film per se, but rather the death of Sitney’s particular “avant-garde:’ Since that time we have seen a general cultural shift, in which the coherent psychological, spiritual and sexual identity of the individual allegedly asserted by the Romantic tradition and examined by Sitney has been replaced by a conception of the individual as a collection of interrelated aspects under the influence of an array of social, cultural, and political forces. This shift manifests itself in film in several ways: through an explicit examination of personal and fam­ily histories: through an interest in the social construction of gender, race, and ethnic identities; through a desire to convey journalistic or documentary content without resorting to discredited concepts of neutrality or objectivity; through a renewed use of “staging,” that is. the performance of roles and scenarios, though without an attempt at the kind of realism that characterizes the mainstream dra­matic film; through the use of language as an integral communicative element; through the recombination of found/appropriated materials in films made using existing film footage, photographs, consumer objects, etc.; through the live “film performance;’ which challenges the idea of film as a mechanical medium of mass reproduction; and through a burgeoning interest in manipulating the chemical surface of the image.

In short, it is a certain purism of purpose and of form that has been given up by the new generations, but not necessarily a desire to see changes in the world. The development of self-financing, underground “microcinemas,” where a good deal of the material shown has both an activist and an experimental character. testifies to the continuing role of film as an art that aims to contest and to chal­lenge social, political, economic and aesthetic hierarchies, as well as conventions of vision and representation. If anything, it is the members of the avant-garde that Fred Camper so fondly remembers who have found their way into the security of academe, while their contemporary counterparts, practising a myriad of hybrid forms, continue to struggle in a social and artistic environment hostile to film art. Yet the degree to which experimental film has not been accepted into the art world as an equal and crucial form, despite its overwhelming cultural importance over the past century. suggests that there continues to be something “indigestible” about the work, something which resists commodification and academicization. As the very idea of a unifying, central identity disappears. the pathways taken by film­makers become ever more labyrinthine and far-flung, so that the job of the would-be taxonomist becomes difficult, perhaps even impossible. My aim below, then, is to account for some of the disparate elements of contemporary experi­mental film. creating loose categories that are subject to cross-pollination.

FOUND IMAGES

Critique is implicit in most contemporary found-footage films, and in films which appropriate images through related forms such as collage animation. Recently, we have seen the emergence of the experimental film “remake.” Jill Codmillow’s What Farocki Taught (I998), a remake of Harun Farocki’s Inextinguishable Fire (1969), and Elizabeth Subrin’sShulie, a remake of a 60s documentary about the young feminist Shularnith Firestone, are the best known examples. Implicit it most contemporary found-footage films is a challenge to conventional codes of representation and the social, political and sexual norms that are seen to he sup­ported by those codes. This political intent distinguishes contemporary uses of found footage from the more poetic, symbolic, or formal uses by film artists who began their work in earlier decades (eg.. Joseph Cornell, Bruce Conner).

In tiny units of a few frames each, Austrian filmmaker Martin Arnold reworks scenes from Hollywood movies, which he has defined as “a cinema of repression and denial”(Address). Arnold’s work emphasizes the mechanical rhythm of the pro­jected image and hearkens hack to the idea of cinema as a machine for the analy­sis of motion. Arnold’s films may be the fulfillment of Ilugo Musterberg’s 1915 essay describing the possibilities of reordering photographed motion in small groups of frames in order to discover a new rhythm impossible in nature. For Arnold. however, the cinematic machine is primarily an ideological apparatus, and he retools this apparatus in order to draw out every drop of meaning latent in the original material. Arnold’s Passage (I EActe (1993) reworks a scene of several sec­onds’ length from 7o Kill a Mockingbird (1992), extending it to 12 minutes by repeating every few frames several times. Leaving the original synchronized sound intact, he slowly allows the scene to progress. The effect is vehement, even violent, and creates a portrait of patriarchal family life and racial division from a scene that would pass almost unnoticed in its original context. The actors arc trans­formed into twitching puppets in the throes of an ideological seizure.

Like Martin Arnold. American filmmaker jay Rosenblatt has a background in psychology, and mounts his critique as a sort of diagnosis of symptoms. Rosenblatt uses found footage for the creation of compact. personal essays on subjects rang­ing from the construction of masculine identity in childhood (The Smell of Burning Ants. 1994) to theidiosyncracies of the 20th century’s great dictators (Human Remains, 1998) and the historical conflicts between Christians and Jews (King of the Jews, 2000). While Rosenblatt’s deployment of found images may seem relatively straightforward, functioning as illustration to an argument given in voice-over or titles, he often inverts the images’ values, finding sadness, pain and longing in grandiose, aggressive or blustery gestures. In many instances, Rosenblatt isolates and extends brief moments through optical printing, finding in them a nexus of meaning. In The Smell of Burning Ants, for example, two boys bouncing up and down on a car seat suddenly look at one another, and this look is extended to emphasize the underlying homoerotic subtext of their shared activity.

Craig Baldwin also uses found footage as a way to mount a critical essay, though his tone is less sombre and his thinking more lateral than Rosenblatt’s. In his instant classicTribulation 99: Alien Anomolies Under America (1991), Baldwin orders the film using a system of substitution: a race of alien invaders called Quetzals stands in for Latin American democratic and communist movements, while historical figures are represented by characters from sundry Hollywood movies (e.g., Blacula as Maurice Bishop). The film’s text as a whole, which takes the form of a demented, paranoid, right-wing rant about an alien conspiracy stands in for its opposite: a factual critique of American intervention against leftist movements in Latin America. Filmmaker Craig Baldwin is replaced by his right­wing equivalent, “retired Air Force Colonel Craig Baldwin.” The diversity of Baldwin’s source material and his style of optical printing tend to emphasize the material differences from one shot to the next. Baldwin mixes black-and-white footage with colour and documentary, or educational sources with dramatic sources. Much of the footage is worn, scratched and colour-shifted, so that the seams are emphasized and the result continually reminds the viewer that the film has been “stitched” together, like a patchwork quilt, or Frankenstein’s monster.

The use of found footage can extend to the presentation of intact fragments with minimal alteration. For instance, Peggy Ahwesh’s The Color of Lore (1994) is presented almost in the same form it was found. Ahwesh has simply made an optical print of the found material and added music. Remarkably, this piece, a fragment of pornography beautifully decaying into organic clumps of colour, fits perfectly into the body of her work. The scene shows two women engaging in sex play over the dead, castrated body of a man, a violent conception of an anti-patri­archal lesbian order. Many of Ahwesh’s other films deal with women’s relation­ships in the absence of men, and particularly with moments in which acting can­not be distinguished from “authentic” or unstaged behaviour. Ken Jacobs’ Perfect Movie (1986) is another noteworthy example of the use of unaltered found images. The film consists entirely of unused 196.5 news footage on the assassination of Malcolm X, with its original sync sound intact.

In contrast, animators and collage artists such as .lanie Geiser, Lewis Klahr and Martha Colburn work frame by frame with manufactured objects and images cut from magazines and books, using these as “puppets”” of autobiographical or ideological reconstruction in a sense analogous to Martin Arnold’s refashioning of Hollywood actors into puppets of the cinematic apparatus. Where Geiser and Klahr tend to conjure lambent dream worlds that evoke the thoughts of a child confronted with a world it cannot understand, or the reveries of an addled adult in the grip of a fever or hallucination of nostalgia, Colburn’s animated collages proceed at a manic pace, wringing out perverse combinations of animal, vegetable and sexual images from her source material. Colburn uses pictures from slick magazines, especially pornographic and animal images, in brief and briskly paced films with a distinctly “pop” rhythm and distinctly “anti-pop” production values and morals.

THE DOCUMENTARY IMPULSE

One of the fundamental tenets of high modernism was that a work of art be a self­ contained object, independent of real-world referents. This idea has arisen in many guises. but for experimental film there are two main forms: the Structuralist/Materialist, and the Formalist. The Structuralist/Materialist argument (distinctly different from Sitney’s concept of “Structural” film) turns primarily on the issue of presentation vs. representation. The argument attacks as reactionary any film that relies on illusion for its process of meaning formation. Peter Gidal, probably the most insistent proponent of this position, wrote in 1974:

Structural/Materialist film attempts to be anti-illusionist. The process of the film’s making deals with devices that result in demystification or attempted demystification of the film process … An avant-garde film defined by its develop­ment towards increased materialism and materialist func­tion does not represent, or document, anything … The dialectic of the film is established in that space of tension between materialist flatness, grain, light, movement, and the supposed reality that is represented. Consequently a continual attempt to destroy the illusion is necessary. (1)

In Gidal’s conception, documentation and narrative content presume a passive viewer, and most experimental films, including many abstract works, are under­stood to include some undesirable form of representation. Of the films that make up Sitney’s “Structural film” canon (those by Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, Ernie Gehr, et al.), Gidal writes of how “the discovery of shape (fetishizing shape or system) may become the theme, in fact, the narrative of the film” (1). For all the revolutionary intentions of filmmakers and theorists like Gidal these ideas, and the extremely circumscribed possibilities available to filmmakers working within their boundaries, quickly begin to seem like a form of Marxistpuritanism: no dancing, music, or representation allowed.

The Formalist stream of filmmaking has tended to be less hound by strict rules and formulae, but it shares a generally anti-representational bent with Structuralist/Materialist cinema. In Formalist discourse on film, analogies with music abound. The idea is that film, like music, can engage the audience most intensely when it does not refer to anything outside its own formal system, when it does not rely on representation for its meaning or effect. The conception of film as a kind of “visual music” arose early in the century, and remains an active model for filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, whose non-representational films attempt to embody a type of “pre-linguistic” vision.

If a disavowal of representation was a defining feature of a great deal of experimental filmmaking up to about the mid-70s. a major shift in the postmod­ern period has been the emergence of a generation of artists whose work engages with a specific “extra-filmic” content. However, these artists are not naive about questions of representation, nor do they subscribe to any particular school (e.g., cinema verité/direct cinema) that asserts the possibility of a “neutral” or “objec­tive” representation. Rather, there is a general awareness that every work is a con­struction, an argument, whose formal elements and representational content together constitute the substance of the argument. In a sense, these artists haveexpanded the interest of many structural filmmakers from strictly visual or aural perception to include questions of social, sexual, and political perception. This process demands that the artist foreground the mechanisms by which meaning in a film is constructed, so that traditional documentary techniques (the sync-sound interview or “talking head,” for example) are generally avoided in favour of a clearly constructivist approach that may combine voice-over, titles, original and found footage.

In keeping with this awareness, many artists choose to focus their documen­tary explorations on those subjects closest to them: for instance, their family histo­ries or their sexual, racial, ethnic or religious identities. Su Friedrich maintains a rigorous intellectual distance in excavating her childhood memories in Sink or Swim (1O’H)). ordering the material according to an arbitrary system akin to those often employed by structural filmmakers-the alphabet in reverse (beginning with z for zygote). Elida Schogt, in Zyklon Portraituses a similar distancing tech­nique for her elegiac account of the death of her grandparents during the Holocaust, arranging archival footage, home movies and hand-painted film into two parallel narrative strands. The first recounts Schogt’s Jewish grandparents’ lives in the words of Schogt’s mother; the second describes the development of Zyklon B gas, first as an insecticide, then as the means by which concentration camp prisoners were murdered in vast numbers by the Nazis, the description pre­sented in a neutral tone reminiscent of the conventional documentary. The history of a chemical and the history of Schogt’s ancestors inexorably converge in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Other artists use the documentary form to question the “truth value” of the image. Jesse Lerner’s Ruins (1998) uses the strategy of deliberate and announced falsification to call into question Anglo-European interpretations of pre­Columbian societies such as the Mayan, Aztec and Toltec. Combining found footage with (presumably) scripted interviews, footage shot to look like found footage, etc., Lerner explicitly addresses the difficulty of distinguishing between the “authentic” and the fake, including a brief quote from OrsonWelles’ F 1 ^,or hake (1973). The film also deals with the problem of authenticating pre-Columbian artifacts when the museums are full of fakes and replicas that stand in for “real” artifacts. William Jones’ Massillon (19)1) combines social landscape photography similar to that of James Benning with personal history (his experiences as a gay youth in a homophobic Midwestern environment) and social history (tracing the development of legal constraints on homosexual behaviour). In the film’s final section, these elements are drawn together in a visual and verbal portrait of a new California suburb. Jones’ method emphasizes the condition of the unseen, and the need to go beyond pure vision, by slowly “filling” his images with verbal informa­tion, so that the film’s blank and undistinguished locations become inextricably linked to the history and attitudes of the (unseen) people who inhabit them.

At no other time in cinematic history have so many artists been working directly with the chemical surface of the image, using a multiplicity of techniques: hand processing, colourtoning and arcane chemical treatments; homemade emulsions; application of paints, inks and dyes; scratching, abrading, and applying various materials to the film surface;collaging of cut-up pieces of film; and organic decay processes. A direct approach to the film surface is not new, having many prece­dents in avant-garde practice (e.g., Man Ray’s inclusion of strips of “rayograph” film in his 1923 Retour a la Raison, or Stan Brakhage’s 1955 Reflections on Black, in which the protagonist’s eye-images have been scratched away). Beginning as early as the 1930s-40s there are also examples from experimental animation in the cameraless films of Len Lye, Norman McLaren and Harry Smith. However.partly for economic reasons, but largely because of the enthusiastic interest of a new generation of makers, the sheer amount of this kind of work has vastly increased over the past decade.

Unlike Brakhage, whose cameraless hand-painted and etched films are intended to express an inner reality, a spiritual energy (he could be considered the most prolific abstract expressionist ever), many of these artists emphasize the material of the image in order not only to defeat its illusory qualities. but to draw attention to the physical presence of the film strip in the actual immediate space of the screening room, a concern that derives in part from the earlier Materialist discourse discussed above. This critical intention is confirmed by the frequent use of found footage as a source material for assorted physical alterations. The attack on the chemical surface of the film is implicitly an attack on the intended mean­in(, of the original source images and on the “transparency” of conventional pho­tographic reproduction.

In Germany, in films such as Jurgen Reble’s Zillertal (1989), and the Schmelzdahin collective’s Stadt Im Flamen (1984), artists subject films to organic decay processes and chemical treatments that create swarming masses of colour, often rendering the original images printed on the film barely legible. The sensory appeal of these films is considerable, given their highly textured and often bril­liantly coloured surfaces, but the idea is as much to criticize the meaning of their source material as to provide visual pleasure. Stadt im Flamen (City in Flames), for example, humorously exaggerates the source “text” to the breaking point. Here, the filmmakers work from a super-8 print of a disaster film about an uncon­trolled urban fire along the lines of The Towering Inferno. By burying the film underground for an extended period, colonies of mould and bacteria developed. drawing the pigments in the emulsion into new forms, often intensifying the colours. Under the influence of these processes, the system of representation breaks down, falls into disaster like the crashing buildings and fleeing citizens in the original film’s story.

The Armenian-Canadian filmmaker Gariné Torossian also works directly with the film surface, but in a manner more closely related to Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses (19e4-hH) than to the chemical approaches described above. Torossian chops her films up, dyes them, scratches and tattoos them, and tapes them hack together in new configurations, mixing super-8 and 16mm footage at will. Often this footage is already refilmed from a video image of an artwork or photograph, so that the number of generations of remove from any real-world referent is multi­plied irretrievably. This becomes especially poignant in Girl From Moush (1993), a brief, haunting poem in which Torossian’s longed-for homeland ofArmenia is seen only in borrowed images that have inhabited and fermented in the artist’s mind.

FIIM PERFORMANCE

Some artists working in film reject its status as an impersonal, mass-reproducible object, mounting live film performances. These works partake of the film projec­tion not as “text,” but as event. In these performances it is not enough to run industrially reproduced materials through a projector. The presence of the living artist is required, as in the performance of a piece of music, with the film and the projector as instruments to be played. Prolific Toronto super-8 filmmaker John Porter, in his ongoing Scanning series, uses the entire theatre as a screen, moving the projector by hand to create magical illusionist effects which simultaneously make the spectator acutely aware of the theatre space. San Francisco artist Luis Recoder creates cinematic paradoxes and time loops using found footage by the simple expedient of looping a piece of film so that it runs through the projector twice, allowing images from one section of the film strip to overlap with those from a later section. His Moebius Strip (1900) uses documentation of sports events: we see a racing car tearing down a track from left to right, the camera panning with it, and simultaneously, the same car racing from right to left. The result is one of frenzied motion that cancels itself out. Recoder’s Magenta (1997) uses a badly colour-shifted medical film demonstrating the proper methods for bandag­ing. Again, by running the same film through the. projectortwice, a visual echo is developed in which each action overlaps upon and repeats itself’. The sensation is created of a continuous caress in the context of medical damage, a feeling both soothing and disturbing.

PHILIP HOFFMAN IN CONTEXT

Philip Hoffman’s highly diverse body of work in film, beginning with On The Pond (1978), shares many interests and approaches with the work discussed here, but is distinct in its relation to the documentary tradition (which is of particular importance in the Canadian context) ¹, and in its concern with personal and family history. From On The Pond toDestroying Angel (1998), Hoffman has balanced an awareness of film as a constructed object with a desire to explore specific extra­filmic themes. This has led him to a complex, first-person cinema very different from the formal approach of an earlier generation. When Stan Brakhage films his family in his famous Window Water Baby Moving (1959), or inScenes From Under Childhood (1967-70), the viewer does not learn the names of the people shown, does not hear their voices and discovers nothing of their past. The effect is two-fold: on the one hand, unencumbered by language, the film is able to hold in its form the very specific moments and energy of a particular time with particular people. On the other hand, everything is universalized: the children become all children and represent a state of “childness”; a birth becomes every birth, a symbol for all gen­erations.

In Hoffman’s work the drive is very different and this leads to the inclusion of names and places, and the tracing of specific relationships. However, Hoffman’s acute awareness that the medium is never a neutral carrier of information leads to a variety of representational approaches, which often contain contradictory cues about the “truth value” of the material (see for example ?O,Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film (1986)). Alternatively, in a manner analogous to Craig Baldwin’s indi­rect treatment of his subject in Tribulation 99,Hoffman’s “absent presences” refuse explicit visual representation of their subjects. For example, both ?O,Zoo! and Somewhere Between Jalostotitlan and Encarnacion (1984) have at their centres the story of a death, and in neither case is the dead person or animal represented visually. In varying proportions, Hoffman’s films play documentary content against fiction within a complex and shifting formal treatment.

Hoffman engages in an intense process of self-examination that is also an exploration of the capacities of his medium. In finding an appropriate form for his themes and ideas, Hoffman has developed a multiplicity of styles. But these are not arbitrary exercises; in each case, Hoffman demands of a film that it communi­cate certain crucial ideas to the viewer while promoting an intense awareness of the film’s means of construction. It is ultimately this foregrounding of the means of construction and Hoffman’s casual hybridity of genre, balancing the concerns of documentary, fiction and formal experimentation, that mark Hoffman as a film­maker allied with the impurities of contemporary practice and engaged in a criti­cal dialogue with the “straight” documentary tradition that has been so important in the Canadian context.

Hoffman’s influence as a teacher at Sheridan College and York University has been as important as his artistic influence. For example, although Hoffman’s films evidence a relatively gentle engagement with the chemically altered image, the summer film retreat he founded with his late partner Marian at their rural Mount Forest home has been inspirational to scores of young makers by teaching the basics of first-person hand processing and other chemical treatments of the film surface. This workshop has been a key catalyst in the explosion of first-person, hand-processed, cameraless and chemically-worked films in North America over the past several years.

The balance of interests in Hoffman’s work has shifted markedly from film to film. Much of his work enters into the relationship between documentary, fiction, and formal experimentation described here, while some of his films favour more generally formal visual and aural approaches (e.g., Chimera, 1992-3), and still others venture into aleatoricconstruction (Technilogic Ordering and Opening Series, 1992 ongoing project). In Opening Series, Hoffman gathers together sever­al separate rolls of film, packaging each in its own box with an unrelated image or text on the outside. Audience members are asked to change the order of the boxes as they enter the theatre prior to the screening. Hoffman splices the film together in the order arrived at by the collective choices of the audience members; the film will therefore be projected in a different edit at every screening, moving his work into the realm of “film performance.”

The richness and complexity of Hoffman’s greatest works, which include passing through/torn formations, Kitchener-Berlin and ?O,Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film),have made him one of the important experimental filmmakers of the past twenty years. The insistent hybridity of Hoffman’s practice also marks him as distinctly postmodern, and his particular relation to the documentary tradi­tion as distinctly Canadian. To assert that experimental film is no longer a living force is to ignore the challenge offered by Hoffman’s films and those of many other active filmmakers. If an earlier generation found its identity through a puri­ty of form and identity, the strength of today’s experimental filmmakers may lie in a canny “impurism” that allows them to traverse the boundaries that separate doc­umentary from fiction, abstraction from representation, and political from personal.

WORKS CITED

by Gary Popovich

The films of Philip Hoffman exemplify a process in which raw, amorphous experience undergoes examination, whereupon the filmmaker’s initial emotion and volition are sublimated to a state of cognition. The filmmaking process acts as a catalyst organizing nature, objects, people, events, film (and other media), memory, and time into a comprehensible form for understanding experience. The phenomenological (both that which is captured on film and that which is Lot captured on film) is ordered into an ontological system by the act of filmmaking.

Nature, or objects in nature, rarely stand for something else in Hoffman’s films. Buildings, dogs, vehicles, ponds, and beaches have a relationship to the past, or conjure memories of the past, which stir the filmmaker to put the stories, events, and memory fragments in relationship to the present. As experiential images captured on film they open a context which demands questions from the filmmaker during his editing: Where was I then? What happened? Why did I want to remember it, to capture it on film? What is its relationship to the past, and to similar older film footage? Was it the colour, or form which captured my eye, or did it serve as a respite from the hectic interaction with people? The inherent form, colour, or movement of a shot is reason enough for its inclusion in his films. Objects are often allowed to perform purely cinematic purposes, as opposed to symbolic purposes, so that the filmmaker predicates the logistics of his personal cinematic memory as the sole means of structuring his film.

In his films Hoffman acknowledges the influence of the Beat poets, especially of novelist Jack Kerouac; but I think Hoffman’s form puts into practice the theoretical work done by poet Charles Olson at least to the degree of success attained by the so-called Beat filmmakers (Robert. Frank for example), if not to a greater degree of success, using Olson’s ‘projective’ or ‘open’ form. Olson’s poetics, even in the often idiosyncratic and abstruse language he uses, do clearly strike to the root of Hoffman’s manner of formal organization:

if he (the poet) stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way. It is in this sense that the projective act, which is the artist’s act in the larger field of objects, leads to dimensions larger than the man. For a man’s problem, the moment he takes speech up in all its fullness, is to give his work his seriousness, a seriousness sufficient to cause the thing he makes to try to take its place alongside the things of nature. …breath is man’s special qualification as animal. Sound is a dimension he has extended. Language is one of his proudest acts. And when a poet rests in these as they are in himself … then he, if he chooses to speak from these roots, works in that area where nature has given him size, projective size.¹

I believe the references to language, speech, and breath are applicable to Hoffman’s films in terms of his relationship to the camera. Repeatedly the camera is alluded to being an extension, or inextricable part, of the filmmaker’s body. The act of becoming one with the camera, and one with nature, is exemplified in The Road Ended At The Beach (1983) where Hoffman (as he is dancing over rocks in a stream, camera looking at the rocks and water) concedes that the best time “is when I’m on my own with the camera” or inSomewhere Between Jalostotitlan and Encarnacion when he incorporates the breath, or duration of the spring wind, of the Bolex camera (approximately 28 seconds) into the film as he would his own physical and motor capacities for maneuvering with the camera.

Nature is appreciated for what it is, and displayed as such; mountains or rivers, people or objects, do not derive their significance as symbols but as elements which the filmmaker must confront or through which he must pass. In The Road Ended At The Beach confrontation leads to revelation as object or event recalls a similar more pleasing moment in the past, so that cinematically even the past and present confront each other, thereby manifesting the personal visions, and memories of the filmmaker.

When objects and nature are used in terms of symbols, Hoffman is less successful. Freeze-Up (1979) is weakened by the predictability of movement from the good, calm, bright, warmth of the country to the cold, dark, fast and impersonal city. The images are less than inspired, as if Hoffman’s heart was not at one with the material, creating a coldly impersonal work that cries out for his presence. His strongest work includes himself as a participant in the action. This he has learned to do quite well with growing confidence from On The Pond (1978) to The Road Ended At The Beach culminating in his latest film Somewhere Between where he has learned how to remove actual images of himself from his film while retaining a personal quality through reference to the relationship between himself, his camera, and passing events.

Freeze-Up also suffers due to the restrictive reading of nature which is reduced to a few probabilities rather than leaving it open, for the most part, as it is in The Road Ended At The Beach and Somewhere Between. Vestiges of restrictive signification of objects are still in evidence in The Road Ended At The Beach (such as the ‘Feeling Satisfied’ sign which is a rather trite comment upon the growing disenchantment of the travellers with their journey) but these have disappeared in Somewhere Between. When Hoffman does not take the elements he works with into himself, and resorts to the imposition of foreign elements (whether they be resonant with understandable symbolic cultural signification or not) the phenomenological remains in the realm of phenomena and neither the audience nor the filmmaker has come any closer in understanding the ontological relationship between the filmmaker and his work. However, when Hoffman’s bond with nature and his art is most successfully manifested through the depiction of his vicissitudinous relationships between people, events, and objects he, in a practical sense, captures the essence of the theoretical definition of art proposed by Nietzsche in his famous dictum* “art is not merely imitation of the reality of nature but rather a metaphysical supplement of the reality of nature, placed beside it for its overcoming.”²

At the same time Hoffman must ask himself in what way film, or the camera, gets in the way; in what way does it restructure the manner in which we look at experience by the nature of cinematic selectivity of shooting and editing? The presence of the camera is repeatedly acknowledged; the filmmaker grapples continually with the meaning of what he has recorded on film and what he would have liked to record. In On The Pond snapshots and slides from the filmmaker’s childhood are buttressed against live action footage of a young boy playing hockey and the filmmaker sifting through hockey memorabilia. The old slides are thus instilled with an emotional quality which reaches the audience, capturing, in their juxtaposition with live footage, quite successfully the spirit of what was initially only of private value. For all its slides, its periodic self references, and the opening slate, On The Pond is not nearly as reflexive or self-consciously reflective as The Road Ended At The Beach. In this film a trip east documented by the filmmaker and two friends is edited with film footage of previous trips to the east and west coasts of Canada, with occasional references to trips undertaken by Conrad Dube, a physically handicapped bicycle rider who has clocked 308,000 km. world-wide; Rup Chand, an old Tibetan friend who inspires Hoffman to keep a journal after talks about trips to the far east; and Kerouac and Cassidy, who seem to have been the seminal influences of filmmaker-road traveller Hoffman. The film is laden with photographs, old films, inter-titles, conversation about previous films of Hoffman and his filmmaker friend Richard Kerr,³ conversation concerning the present film, references to the camera, and shots of the filmmaker both travelling and at work on the film.

The trip, full of disappointment and frustration, is continually set in contrast to more glorious or exotic trips in the past. This trek to the east coast, having been consciously planned as a trip for documentation on film, by its very nature is conducive to introspection and comparison by the filmmaker and his art. His hopes may have been set too high in anticipation of dazzling film footage of adventure. Pressed by his preconceived needs and the cost of such an undertaking he feels the trip is failing to deliver that which was expected; the result is a documentation of his own reflective thoughts and cinematic perceptions concerning failure to measure up to the past, failure to realize the idealized preconceptions one might have about a trip that would seem to hold great promise, and failure to actually see the richness that the present does hold (albeit hidden during the actual shooting) so that the finished film is a rich mosaic that successfully captures the predilections and artistic turmoils of the filmmaker in the midst of trying to understand his artform.

A brilliant example of this occurs through the use of a repeated fragment of dialogue over two shots that although formally similar, contextually reveal the filmmaker’s reflections on the disparity between. bright expectation at the beginning and introspection towards the end. As the three friends set out in their van, Hoffman gives us a shot from inside of the van looking out to the road ahead (the characters in silhouette, the road ahead exposed for detail), while on the soundtrack Jim, the driver, sings and comments about the “big last run” of the van. After the meeting with Robert Frank (which is disturbingly anti-climactic due to Frank’s stand-offish manner) Hoffman cuts in shots of the stern of a ferry and the wake behind it, ferry smoke stacks, a shot out of a porthole which dissolves to red, then dissolves to a shot of himself in a room listening to sound from the film, to a shot from inside the van once again — this time with the view out of the van windshield over-exposed while the interior of the van is exposed for detail. As we hear Jim repeat “the big last run” Hoffman’s voice comes on the sound­track to says “The trip begins again. Now I look inside the van.” From ‘this point onward the shots of past trips come into disparaging collision with the present due to their perceived banality and mundaneness, and especially due to Hoffman’s harsh interpolatory comments such as: “I recall more exotic trips … he (Jim) told me he’d rather be at home … he (Richard Kerr) must have felt imprisone¹ by the van … I expected adventure, but the road had died since the first trip west with Jim … the best time for me is when I’m on my own with the camera.” With shots through mirrors, looking back, from an automobile speeding through the rain on a distant western trip and some final disparaging remarks, the camera ends up on an eastern beach in Newfoundland with no further to go. The camera itself seems to reflect on how far it has come, looking incessantly at a large rock in the ocean, with reflection, and the return, its only alternative.

Hoffman appears in Somewhere Between only through the first person singular ‘I’ in the intertitles. Retaining its personal quality through the titles, the film’s images (gathered from various locations in Mexico; Boulder, Colorado; and Toronto, Ontario) organize the phenomena of experience into a system that attempts to understand the myriad of spiritual feelings and spiritual acts in a universal sense. The text tells the story of a dead Mexican youth encountered by the filmmaker “on the road.” Among the visuals are Mexican street scenes, pious worshippers in front of a church, children inside a church, street bands, and a religious parade. The filmmaker, at this point in his career, realizes the richness of documenting his own searching attempts to bring together related experience. In one segment an artist is copying a painting of Christ. Superimposed over the image of the artist is a close-up of his hand and brush in motion; however, as the brush moves it seems to be tracing the outline of, and painting, the artist himself, so as to say that as one creates a work of art one is actually drawing oneself. The subject of much of 20th century art involves artistic activity as a paradigm of experience and free activity without prescribed norms. Hoffman himself seems to feel that by making the process of filmmaking a large part of his subject, he can best demonstrate the action of filmmaking and his relationship to it.

Along with nature and reflexivity, children too figure prominently in Hoffman’s films. After a clapboard is removed from the shot, On The Pond begins with an outdoor nighttime scene and a young boy’s voice asking: “Are we going to do it tomorrow?” A voice, which we assume belongs to the filmmaker, responds with a simple “yes.” What they do the next day is both shoot the film and play some hockey. The. boy plays a role similar to that which we can imagine Hoffman to have played as a young boy fascinated with hockey and the ice skating pond. In fact the boy acts as a means to manifest the filmmaker’s own personal childhood experiences and emotions. He captures the boy’s joy, his preoccupation with, and concentration on, hockey, as well as the attendant fears and embarrassments. Intercut with this footage are slides projected off a screen, while on the soundtrack the filmmaker’s family provides a commentary.

In a wonderfully evocative scene we see an array of old slides of the pond area is a young woman’s voice says “I wanna go back.” Hoffman then dissolves from the slides to live action slow motion footage of the young boy stick-handling a puck around his dog. He then inserts a_.match cut of pages flipping, then a match cut of the boy waving his scarf in the direction of the dog and the camera while on the soundtrack we hear the growing buzz of an arena crowd. As the boy, now stick-handling again, falls to the ice, the soundtrack crossfades from a shouting crowd to the family laughing loudly, whereupon Hoffman finally cuts to a slide of a bald headed boy (undoubtedly Hoffman himself) standing out amongst other family members. The scene delineates a complex relationship between the private and fragile self-conceptions of childhood, and the often disquieting insouciance of the public (family included), while Hoffman leaves no doubt that an adult filmmaker, too, is not immune to this kind of suffering.

In The Road Ended At The Beach Hoffman begins by looking, as with the eyes of a child, back to his heroes in literature (Kerouac) and photography (Frank) and to previous trips, soon finding himself asking what it means to confront their stories with his own self-styled model of their journeys. They have become older; their legends demystified, they have become part of mundane reality. For Hoffman, action must be put on hold; the time for reflection ha come. By the end of the film he has come to the edge of land and water where he stares out at a large enigmatic rock in the ocean. On the sound­track and in front of the camera, children, oblivious to Hoffman, are able to transform the distant rock into their personal plaything singing to the tune of “On Top of Old Smokey.” Hoffman stares at the rock trying to com­prehend after all the distance he has come; the children accept it as part of their experience. The song recalls a similar scene in Robert Frank’s film Pull My Daisy in which a child interrupts the narrative track, which is other­wise dominated by Jack Kerouac, by singing “Humpty Dumpty.” The child’s nursery rhyme has as much validity as the musings of a wild poet. But where this makes a rupture and sets the apartment confined poets in search of adventure accompanied by Kerouac’s musically phrased “let’s go … let’s go!” in Pull My Daisy, Hoffman, in The Road Ended At The Beach, seems to say ‘we’ve been… let us stop now and examine where we have been … let us try to comprehend.’ Realizing that it is his own personal journey that matters most, and that some aspects of nature and existence can best be understood, or come to terms with, through the imagination, Hoffman is able to work more confidently and universally in scope in his next film.

Where in The Road Ended At The Beach documentation on film seems to be the pre-text for the journey, in Somewhere Between the journey serves as a pre-text for the triangulation of simultaneous spiritual events (Toronto, Boulder, and Mexico). Through the inter-titles we get the story of the dead boy on the Mexican road; the images show us children playing in an empty church, a child begging for money in front of a street band; a little girl playing on a large sculptured model of a snail, and children dressed as angels in celebration of the Feast of Fatima. A certain ambiguity arises from these images in juxtaposition with the text. The last title tells us “the boy’s spirit left through its blue.” In the visuals the children seem to be cinematically orchestrated in concert for the redemption, safe passage, or re-incarnation of the boy’s spirit; but the film is full of walls. The camera searches along them, over them, through doorways, but we can only get a glimpse at what lies beyond due to interruptions such as a hesitant and shaky camera or a deliberate cut away. Throughout the scene in which children parade as angels and an artist copies a painting of Christ, Hoffman has super­imposed a blue wall. The camera’s long look at the end of The Road Ended At The Beach (the realization point) has superimposed its lesson over much of Somewhere Between, so that barriers and the inability to-entirely understand all experience is now accepted and the filmmaker is free to express and orchestrate the feelings he has, upon seeing the dead boy, without attempting an explanation.

The manner in which time is used, in two of the three films discussed here, is a direct reflection of the difficulty in dealing with present experience. Feeling the past encroaching upon each present moment, camera in hand, Hoffman documents the apparent lack he feels. In both On The Pond and The Road Ended At The Beach this is initiated by memory, discovered and analyzed as he sifts through the past and present visual and aural material .he has gathered, and communicated to an audience by means of his editing. The film, as finished product, is the result of trying to come to terms with the present.

In Somewhere Between the present no longer intrudes upon the filmmaking. The first title reads:

looking through the lens at passing events
i recall what once was
and consider what might be

Initially this would seem to be the same approach employed in The Road Ended At The Beach; however, the consideration of “what might be” is no longer predicated upon a restrictive reading of a dichotomous past-present laden with inquietude. Hoffman, having extricated himself from the obfuscatory fetters of time, is now able to consider a harmony among pro-filmic events. The intertitles often mix the past and present tenses in the same breath.⁵ The images have a time­less quality;⁶ while space is rendered ambiguous, inasmuch as one is not sure whether—certain images were shot in Toronto, Boulder, or Mexico.

Two clear aspects of time do emerges (1) Hoffman before the lens considering time, and (2) the present time of sitting through the actual screening of the film; all other aspects of time are emotional and spiritual. When a title announces:

the little girl
with big eyes,
waits by her dead brother

The corresponding image is not from Mexico, not from the same time, but is emotionally connected to the text — we see a young girl climbing and crawling upon a large sculptured snail in Boulder. Her face, and backward glances toward the camera, suggest numerous unanswerable questions which one could well imagine the dead boy’s sister posing — and the filmmaker no less. An immemorial tenor is suggested that parallels Hoffman’s superimpositions of the painter’s brush strokes upon himself, placing the camera in a long line of tradition which finds itself pre-occupied with spiritual questions or spiritual imagery in an often secular sense. It is secular to the extent that Hoffman’s imagery is of the mundane, of the quotidian, while the narrative text, delivered with white letters on black, attempts to conjure a sense of the extra-mundane (such as in the final title when “the boy’s spirit left through its blue”).

Up to The Road Ended At The Beach Hoffman displayed a methodical structuring of the interactions of various time elements; with The Road Ended At The Beach he seems to have found synchronicity to be a fundamental, or necessary, grounding to his work. Yet the ideas, feelings, and impressions are more contiguous than they are synchronous. The contiguous past and present elements form a dialectic through the editing, resulting in an asperous look to the film akin to the image we might have of the filmmaker on his journey. The counterpoint in Somewhere Between is of a deeper weave; the narrative text suggestively imprints images on the mind (that endure in a manner similar to the persistence of vision properties in viewing motion picture images) forcing the viewer to juggle these images with the actual visual images in the film, so that the film’s structure resembles that of a musical fugue. As opposed to distinguishing the two, if one allows both sets of images (the filmic and the suggested) to come together as one, a preterite film image tense co-existing with the past-present tense of the text creates a form of preterite present tense (as articulated by the filmmaker in the opening title) releasing the filmmaker and the viewer from the restrictions of time. In effect, the viewer plays as much a hart in structuring the work as the filmmaker has — choosing where, how,*and when to accent the two sets of complimentary images. The intrusive and/or disjunctive editing style of The Road Ended At The Beach has been replaced by a simplified form of cutting on the breaths, or lengths of the Bolex camera’s shot, alternating with an intertitle so that the intrusions and/or disjunctions are within the shots not in their juxtaposition.

In The Road Ended At The Beach the camera “got in the way” between Hoffman and his subjects; it prevented the filmmaker from realizing on film his preconceived ideas of how the trip would unfold and how it would, or could, be documented. In Somewhere Between an intertitle tells us:

on the road dead, lies a mexican youth i put the camera down the cop car passed right by

In order to come closer to events, to get in tune with them, at times it is necessary to lay the camera down, looking not through the pre-figured limit­ations of a lens and with the sensibility that accompanies the act of filmmaking, but to see with one’s own eyes and to look for the existing relationships.? The result is a feeling of synchronicity with objects, people, and events represented by images from Toronto, Boulder, and various locales in Mexico (excepting the area where the dead boy was encountered). The rough hand­held camera searching through a Mexican alleyway, the children wandering among the empty congregation chairs framed between two solid church pillars with a large crucifix visible in the background, the street bands in Mexico and Boulder, the religious festival in Toronto replete with a large sculpture of the virgin and with children parading as angels, the young girl on the snail, and the quiet stream are a result of the sublimating of the initial emotion inspired by the dead child and the power of willing initially foreign elements to move in harmony with one another and with the narrative text. This attitude in the filmmaker is arrived at through the persistent efforts to understand the phenomenological in terms of his relationship to the art of filmmaking, but could only have reached this state of fruition by the ongoing realization (through On The Pond and The Road Ended At The Beach) that the form of a film suggests itself if one is able to see clearly the relationships between seemingly disparate elements (objects, events, and people), the camera, and the eye of the filmmaker. So the somewhat un­specific ‘somewhere’ between Jalostotitlan and Encarnacion⁸ is rendered explicitly as everywhere between what one can see and what one can imagine.

In relation to time, and in its two states of liquid and solid, water plays an important role in Hoffman’s films. The water in On The Pond, in its frozen state, is an arena of inward reflection that catalytically allows the filmmaker to reach back in time to his own childhood. The juxtaposition of documented evidence of the past (snapshots and slides) with the shots of Hoffman, as a filmmaker, returning to the frozen pond reveal the disparity between what the slides signify to an independent observer and Hoffman’s own personal feelings towards the frozen moment which only through his manipulation can relay to the audience the same warmth and emotional depth he feels in them. What has not changed, one senses, is Hoffman’s emotional relationship to the public and private aspects of his chosen activity (the love of hockey as a youth, and hockey and filmmaking as an adult) so that over the course of time only the ability to articulate feelings has changed — it has become more adroit.

The Road Ended At The Beach begins and ends with the sounds of waves. What surfaces through the course of the film is Hoffman’s dissatisfaction and attempts to come to terms with the shards of recalled time,- both in memory and on film, that suggest  that the present view of things is grossly at odds with one’s past idealized perceptions. The finished film, in effect, creates a new past which, once examined by the filmmaker, has a validity and importance which was not recognizable during the actual shooting of the film. This idea is not reactionary in and of itself as the past is not so much romanticized as it is misunderstood in its relationship to the present; so that the methodical work of the filmmaker pushes forward his understanding and ability to deal with the present tense of his filmmaking by taking into account his initially unfocussed way of perceiving the past.

The waves and water bracketing the film suggest that the problem is immemorial and is, of necessity, a problem which Hoffman must deal with if he is to grow as a filmmaker.

Each image in Somewhere Between begs a question, is a hypothetical response to the story of the dead boy. From the questions he posed about time, his frustrated ideals, the inability to communicate as effectively as he would like, and tumultuous emotions he felt in The Road Ended At The Beach Hoffman has learned not to expect concrete answers but to keep his camera searching for the unity of experience and emotion which he feels is bound to all that his camera chooses to record. The last image of the film, a serene stream in the woods,⁹ with the saxophonist exhaling his final quiet breaths into his instrument, predicates the value of the unanswerable questions concerning life and death and the contradictory elements of existence with which the filmmaker has now learned to live. Although tinged with a sense of regret or helplessness, Hoffman, with the last title, draws us an image of pathetic fallacy that both asserts the inexorable and oblivious march of time and his own sense of the synchronicity of mundane elements:

big trucks spit black smoke
clouds hung
the boy’s spirit left through its blue

The multi-media piece The River, Hoffman’s latest work, reflects his growing interest concerning the reproduction of images and the representation of pro-filmic events on both film and video, as well as dealing with motifs (such as nature, time, and water) that have surfaced in previous films. The first piece of The River is a 3 minute 16mm film showing a river and river bank from the point of view of the cameraman on a boat. The film captures the glimmering of the sun reflecting off the water, the texture of the leaves on the trees, and a three dimensional look which one has come to expect from realistically represented images. The film is silent, so the movement of objects (dropping of a bobber, splashing of a paddle) and the movement of the boat has an ethereal quality.

The next piece is on black and white video with sound. The images, although sharp and crystal clear, look decidedly different from the film image in fact, the water and reflections from the water have an abstract look about them. The camera is often moved jarringly and the sound is harsh and it intrusively accentuates the movement of the boat and the boat’s objects which had all been smooth and slick in the film. The boat scrapes by branches, and at one point comes into collision with a fallen tree protruding from the shore. Nature, in this video, is something to contend with; and appropriately we get shadows and reflections of the cameraman (Hoffman) shooting his images, as well as shots of the microphone being buffeted about by the gear on the boat during a long camera pan. If the film portion exuded a seamless string of ethereal images, the video portion undermines, by interruptions, the false serenity of the original footage.

The final piece is the original 16mm film flipped on its horizontal axis, so that the image is reversed, and recorded onto video directly from a screen projection of the film. The 1/24 second flickers of the film are captured on video resulting in further abstraction; the three dimensional quality and the glossy look has disappeared. The sounds, including those of birds, seem louder and incommensurate with the images — as if they were overcompensating for the deterioration of the representational images.

A significant work in images and representation, and the meaning various processes construct in relationship to pro-filmic and filmic events, The River remains more of an exercise (albeit an important one) than a finished product. The original film footage seems to have been shot prior to the intent of incorporation into a larger multi-media piece — but Hoffman’s most successful shooting has always preceded the conscious conceptual­ization of a final form.

The various forms of media, with which Hoffman has been preoccupied in his films were in need of undergoing the type of examination that The River offers — in fact more rigorous examination is still necessary. In making The Road Ended At The Beach the filmmaker learned not only that the camera got in the way, but how it got in the way; in Somewhere Between it was learned how the filmmaker, the camera, and the pro-filmic events could be rendered accordant. Using the process of filmmaking to order phenomenological events into an understandable ontological system, Hoffman has documented both his own growth in film and his growing understanding of his relationship to filmic and extra-filmic experience. With The River he turns outward to the territory, as yet only peripherally explored by him, in which spectator-­screen-image-filmmaker relationships are to be explored, so that the process of filmmaking will provide him with a means of epistemologically querying the cinematographic sound and image.

Notes

by Mike Hoolboom

The films of Philip Hoffman have revived the travelogue, long the preserve of tourism officials anxious to convert geography into currency. Hoffman’s passages are too deeply felt, too troubled in their remembrance, and too radical in their rethinking of the Canadian documentary tradition to quicken the pulse of an audience given to starlight. He has moved from his first college-produced short, On the Pond (1978) — set between the filmmaker’s familial home and his newfound residence at college — to a trek across Canada in The Road Ended at the Beach (1983). In Mexico he made the haiku-inspired short Somewhere Between Jalostotitlan and Encarnacion (1984). The next year he was invited toAmsterdam to observe the set of Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Noughts, and made ?O,Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film) (1986). Trips to Europe to unearth the roots of his family formed the basis for passing through/torn formation’s (1988) pan-continental dialogue of madness and memory. Kitchener-Berlin (1990) takes up this immigrant connection from his father’s side of the family. And the last work, in what was only named afterwards as a cycle, a revolving peer of understanding, is river (1978-89), which is both a return home, and an acknowledgement of the restless flux which lies at the heart of this project. For all of their circumnavigations, this cycle is primarily concerned with pictures of home and family, gathered with a keen diarist’s eye which has revamped its vision at every turn, shifting styles with every work, as if in answer to its subject. Denoting the family as source and stage of inspiration, Hoffman’s gracious archeology mines a concession of tragic encounters, powerfully refashioning his intersection with the limits of representation. His restless navigations are invariably followed by months of tortuous editing as history is strained through its own image, recalling Derrida’s dictum that everything 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.

On the Pond (9 min b/w 1978) is an elaboration of the family slide show, its intimate portraits greeted with squeals of recognition and a generational shudder of light and shadow. The slides show the filmmaker as a child, his unguarded expression an ensign for innocence. In winter he is dwarfed by the furry excess of his parka, summertime finds him casting flies on the Saugeen River (subject of the final film in this cycle), trekking through forest, or lounging by the family cottage. Reviewing the photographs with family, the filmmaker asks, “What do I look like?” in a gesture that underlines the reliance of identity on the family’s complex of role play, fantasy, and projection, on its investment in shared secrets, and its dramatic restagings of generational loss and symmetrical neglects. As the author of the film, Hoffman assumes a distinctly paternal guise, but within its confines he is very much the son, waiting on his elders for the signs of assent that will take shape as his own desire. Hoffman offers up these photographs as evidence, insistently returning to moments whose nostalgic impress provides a blank for the interchange of codes and riddles. These are hieroglyphs from the dead world, resurrected in order to reconstruct the memory of a time alien even to its inhabitants, because the measure of this familial solidarity must rely on a willful disavowal of experience, casting aside the ghosts of illness and psychosis, turning away from all that fails to conform to the familial ideal. What lies unspoken here, though hinted at in Hoffman’s careful editing, are stories of a darker nature, his mother’s illness, the death of relatives and the traumas of dislocation.

These photographs are drawn in a dialectic with dramatic re-enactments of Hoffman’s boyhood. These centre on a boy of seven skating “on the pond,” his only company a German shepherd. As he diligently hones his puck handling skills, his easy skate over the big ice is interrupted by intrusive voice-overs — the exhortations of a coach and the scream of hockey parents. As Hoffman pans over a well stocked trophy case and the young boy falls to the ice in a paroxysm of push-ups, the public stakes of this private practice become clear. He is leaving the family. His play has already become a kind of work, the means by which he will move from the pond to the city, though the cost is the incessant clamour for achievement. Everywhere the superego beckons.

No soon has the dream has been conjured then it ends. In a long pan over a projector run out of film and a record player at the end of its disk, the filmmaker rises from his bedside vigil over the past to close the apparatus of memory. Confronted with the escalating tensions of his trade, and a growing distance from his cherished solitude on the pond, Hoffman quits hockey, turning instead to a diaristic filmmaking which will stage the self in its various incarnations. All this is suggested in the film’s closing shot, which shows Hoffman join his young double, confidently calling for the puck before slipping on the icy sheen, no longer the player he once was. Brilliantly photographed in black-and-white, with a spare piano score and a sure use of accompanying sound, On the Pond marked an auspicious debut from Canada’s premier diarist.

The Road Ended at the Beach (33 min 1983) is a shaggy road flick whose waystations of memory allow past adventures to meld into present ones, though its true aim is neither adventure nor destination, but an examination of male myth. Setting off for Canada’s east coast, Hoffman joins two friends, fellow filmmaker Richard Kerr, enlisted as soundrecordist, and Jim McMurry, driver of the van. Road’s opening sequence finds them bent over the van, painting over its psychedelic glyphs with a fluorescent orange. Each of the “characters” is introduced through flashback — McMurry as the manic, fast-talking, blues-singing driver of past trips, Kerr as a fishing pal and filmmaking companion. In Ottawa they meet up with Mark, a friend who used to play jazz trumpet but now blows in a military band. “There’s things you do for love and there’s things you do for money,” he flatly intones as the travelers move on, meeting Conrad Dubé, a cyclist since 1953, who has crossed the globe eight times, barely able to speak due to infantile paralysis. In Sable River they find Dan, a friend from film school now working in the east coast fisheries, trapped in a dead-end job in order to support his family. They push on to Cape Breton where they find Robert Frank, avatar of Beat romance and adventure, the irascible photographer whose book The Americans undraped a mythic travelogue of naked encounters. But he appears before them on a distinctly human scale, and they stand together as four strangers feebly attempting to speak, their visit inspired by nostalgia over a time they never had. Frank’s visit marks the end of Road‘s first movement, an eastwards passage whose outlook rested squarely in the rearview mirror, as if the burden of memory lay so heavy on the roadside that this was a journey of time instead of topography, the van’s speed unable to outrace the velocity of the past.

Road’s second movement opens with the remark, “Now I look inside the van.” Once again each of the three characters is introduced — the filmmaker lost in a reverie of Kerouac adventures, McMurry obsessed with the wretched condition of the van, and Kerr feeling imprisoned. Hoffman notes, “I expected adventure, but somehow the road had died since the first trip west,” a summary assessment of old ties which have vanished even before the trip’s begun. Today their cross-country dash serves only as a reminder of their differences, the passing of youth, and the end of an exclusively male fraternity. The third movement, entitled The Road Ended at the Beach, features a reprise of the film’s encounters and Frank’s weary responses to questions about his Beat relations of two decades before. “Maybe it was freer because you know less. I never kept in close contact with them. Sometimes I see Allen…” These offerings mark an eerie prophecy for the three travelers, whose time of abandoned locomotion is past. The din of the road can no longer disguise the fact that they never learned to speak with one another. The film ends with the promise of its title: children and dogs moving back and forth across the beach as a massive rocky outcropping peers out of the waters in the distance. These planes of play, passage, and foreboding are a metaphor for the film’s journey. Road is a passage from innocence to experience, cast beneath the paternal backdrop of a Beat mythos, its romantic notions of flight decomposed here in the cold frame of the van.

Somewhere Between Jalostotitlan and Encarnacion (6 min 1984) is a hand-held travelogue of North America, presented in the unbroken twenty-eight-second shots of a spring-wind camera and the intertitles of a Mexican journey. Hoffman’s pictures show moments of the everyday, drawn from public circumstances and viewed from a discrete distance. It opens with a pair of dirt roads marking an intersection, and beyond them a massive rouged advert for Coca-Cola. As diesel trucks storm past, we wait with the burro, tethered to an adjacent telephone post, as if waiting for the passing dream of technology to dissolve again into the Mexican roadside. Two shots frame street musicians while, on the track, a horn squalls plaintively, the lone aural counterpart to this requisition of the everyday. These pictures form part of an alternating passage of image and text that occupies the body of the film. Homely, hand-lettered haikus relate the story of a Mexican boy lying dead, his passage of mourning and reclamation charged in Hoffman’s blank verse. The filmmaker pointedly refuses to make an image of this stranger, and this refusal is the real subject of this travelogue. Each of his images are suffused with this death, as the words struggle to suggest all that lies beyond representation.

?O,Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film) (23 min 1986) was occasioned by an invitation from British filmmaker Peter Greenaway to observe the shoot of A Zed and Two Noughts. Hoffman’s diary excerpts are rife with a Greenaway-esque fiction which pits two English fathers as competing heirs to the originary mantle of Canadian documentary practice. The first is Greenaway himself, linchpin of the structuralist mockumentary. His employment of BBC baritone Colin Canticle and serial musician Michael Nyman lent his early work an authentic documentary feel, although his voice-over texts are patently fabricated — speculative fictions which often catalogue an inexorable progression towards death. This willful play of documentary forms is set against the second father in Zoo’s lineage — John Grierson. Grierson was the British cultural czar who founded the National Film Board (NFB), a federal institution whose documentary praxis was designed “to show Canada to Canadians.” His sternly realist conventions undermined Canadian dramatic aspirations; the NFB’scolonialist perspectives would remain the most public expression of Canadian film for decades. For many years a documentary seminar bearing Grierson’s name gathered makers from around the world, and it was there that Hoffman and Greenaway met, and where the invitation to observe Greenaway’s shoot was extended, as Hoffman explains in his film.

Hoffman’s rendering of the Greenaway production focuses on its apparatus of shaping, on the efforts of an elephantine crew to produce light where there is none, hang invisible cords, lay track, and gather some of the dissembling flocks that crowd Greenaway’s zoo allegory. Interposed with fables of construction are a number of diary interludes which are captioned in a hilariously understated voice-over read by an actor. Alongside an image of a large wooden apple overlooking an empty park, Hoffman spins a tale of lovers who look to its girth for privacy, the approach of a voyeuristic teenager who is eventually joined by his romantically troubled companion, and finally a group of boys who arrive, pitching sticks for their dog in an effort to disturb the couple. The narrator recites, “I crossed the river and this is what I filmed after they all left.” This narrative construct of extra-filmic events, of all that lies outside the frame, points to the meek rectangle of the apparatus, its soft enclosures pregnant with syntax. By framing his diaristic intentions within a tradition of Canadian documentary practice, Hoffman underlines the radical contingency of the image — its status as truth and guarantor of experience lost in the runes of a text that may shape it to any end whatsoever. The truth of an image lies outside its frame, in the restless constellation of discourse and ideology that surrounds any image and its reception. This observation is especially pointed in a Canadian setting, where the bulk of early Film Board productions was comprised entirely of newsreel footage culled from abroad. The act of documentary lay in their ordering, and in composing the inevitable voice-over text that would grant these pictures coherence. Adopting the Greenaway strategy of fictional ruses applied to documentary settings, Hoffman decomposes the Grierson legacy, unmasking its alliance with state control, class hierarchies, and mythologies of the noble poor. He insists that documentary practice is a fiction after all, a construction of fragments aligned to the ends of its maker.

Nowhere is the reliance of cinema on a meta-narrative more pronounced than in the film’s mid-section. The narrator recounts a visit to the zoo where one of the elephants suffers a heart attack. He agonizes over whether to film the scene, and finally does, but after the animal’s death he exits ashamed, leaving the footage in the freezer, untouched and unprocessed. This is all declaimed over black — the blank passage representing the footage never developed. But after the credits seal the film, a final image appears — it shows the elephant falling and flailing, and then being helped to its feet by an attendant. So the filmmaker has processed the film, after all. And the elephant did not die, but merely fell. By displacing the film’s centre and leaving it to protrude past the film’s close, Hoffman invites the viewer to fold it back into the film, to join the blank recital of the heart attack with the silent pictures of its recovery, and so to retake the film’s journey, and skeptically overturn its assertions and statements of fact. At once an essay on the Canadian documentary tradition and a long fraternal riddle, ?O,Zoo! scans a flock of red herrings with a luminous photography and rare, reflexive wit.

Hoffman’s sixth film in ten years, passing through/torn formations   (43 min 1987), 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, and migration. An extract from Christopher Dewdney’s Predators of the Adoration begins the film in darkness. The poet narrates the story of “you” — a child who explores an abandoned limestone quarry. Oblivious to the children who play around him, it is the dead that fascinate, pressed together to form limestones that part slowly between prying fingers before lifting into a lost horizon. After this textual prelude in darkness, the following scene is painfully silent. It shows a woman feeding her enfeebled mother in a quiet reversal of her own infancy. The older woman is clearly nearing death here, and Hoffman’s portrayal of his mother and grandmother is tender and intimate, the camera caressing the two of them slowly, in a communion of touch.

Each figure in the film has a European double, as if the entry into the New World carried with it not only the inevitable burdens of translation, but also the burden of all that could not be said or carried, all that needed to be left behind. There are two grandmothers in the film — Babji, dying in a Canadian old age home and Hanna, whose Czech tales are translated by the filmmaker’s mother. There are likewise two grandfathers — Driououx, married to the dying Babji in Canada and Jancyk, shot by his own son after refusing to cede him land rights. This son is returned to the scene of the shooting by Czech authorities and asked to recreate the event for a police film three months later. Unable to comply he breaks down instead, poised between death and its representation. The murderer’s Canadian double is the uncle,  outcast whose wanderings are at the heart of the film. It is the uncle who builds 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. His accordion playing provides inspiration for the accordion heard on the track, and produces another image of unity within division, the left and right hands operating independently.

The darkroom, a ceremony of mixing potions, gathering up the shimmering images, the silvery magic beneath dream’s surface. In the morning Babji would tell us what our dreams meant, and then stories of the ‘old country’ would surface, stories I can’t remember… now that she’s quiet, we can’t hear about where it all came from, so it’s my turn to go back, knowing at the start the failure of this indulgence, but only to play out these experiments already in motion.     (from passing through/torn formations by Philip Hoffman)

This connection between things made in the dark — doesn’t it lie at the heart of every motion picture? We can say for certain that this darkness has occupied the centre of Hoffman’s film work since Somewhere Between Jalostotitlian and Encarnacion. While Somewhere Between moves around his real life encounter with a boy lying dead on the Mexican roadside, the boy is nowhere to be seen;  Hoffman relates the death in a series of printed intertitles that punctuate the film. Similarly, midway through ?O,Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film), an elephant’s heart attack is related in voice-over while the screen remains dark, and the voice explains, somewhat abashed, that showing the animal’s death could only exploit the subject.

In each instance the missing centre turns around death, and this trope of absence is further complicated by the “missing” centre of passing through. While the film performs a series of balletic turns around the filmmaker’s uncle — showing as many as three images simultaneously, in a counterpoint usually reserved for music — he is usually present only in Hoffman’s narration. Because he is the family’s outsider…. lensing him would show only his infirmities…So Hoffman makes a radical move and both absents his image, while at the same time figuring him as the central character in this familial drama. He represents, for this family…. the dark heart at the centre of this migration to the new world. The cost of traveling, and of forgetting. In a series of fragmented anecdotes, recollections, images and voice-over, we learn of his life…. his affinity for pool and the accordion, his building of the corner mirror…Hoffman searches out the reasons for his uncle’s wandering in the Czechoslovakia they left behind, the place of his conception ravaged by plague and occupation. That he should bear the stamp of this history, this sickness, without a glimpse of the death camps which would claim his ancestors, recalls for us the movement of the film around a figure hardly seen. The filmmaker moves in his place, drawing his camera over the places “he” could never go, looking for reasons “he” could never guess in his restless quest  for the perfect pool game, and the delirium of the accordion.

He stares out. Fingers pound the keyboard. Magically. Melodies repeat. Again and again. Fingers dissolve into fingers. He was past the point of practise. The music was a vacant place to return to. Over and Over. His playing gave him passage.  (from passing through/torn formations  by Philip Hoffman)

Kitchener-Berlin (33 min 1990) is a tale of two cities divided by history, language and geography. Their alliance stems in part from a German migration that would settle on the small Canadian town of Kitchener as the locus for dreams of a new world. Before its re-naming after the catastrophes of WWI, Kitchener was called Berlin, so the film’s title re-asserts this historical relation, in an uncovering typical of Hoffman’s oeuvre.

Kitchener-Berlin is a movement into the city’s Germanic traditions, and its rituals of memory, bereavement, and technology. It is a voyage at once personal and political, begun with movies of home, of children unwrapping war toys with unbridled delight as rockets flare over Germany, reducing its domestic interiors to a shatter of rubble and blood. Hoffman introduces archival photographs of old Kitchener, showing men on the hunt and the building of the main street, while inside the cathedral, candle-lit processions prepare a child for baptism. The only accompanying sound is a church bell inexorably tolling. It is a call to witness, a plaintive demand for gathering, asking that we stand once more before the wounds of the past.

Hoffman enters present-day Germany armed with a Steadicam — a gyroscopic device that permits the camera to float smoothly through space. He guides its disembodied presence over the cobblestones of Berlin, their mortared rectangles forming the foundation of centuries. It floats past tourists lying in wait, cameras at the ready, caught in a slow-motion stare of anticipation in locales previewed in travel guides and brochures. They wait before a massive church front as if for history to materialize, all the better to turn it into souvenirs, proofs of travel, and of identity. As these sites have been photographed so often, these pictures serve only to identify their makers. They state: I was there. Or more simply: I exist. Hoffman’s meta-tourism collects these moments in multiphonic exchange, two and three images appearing simultaneously, as the camera floats past, ghost-like, through those remains of the past we call the present.

Kitchener-Berlin is interrupted midway by a Canadian film made in the twenties entitled The Highway of Tomorrow or How One Makes Two. It shows a dirigible leaving England forCanada, its airborne phallus promising the technological fruits of empire. After landing, the filmmaker/pilot steps into the editing room with his double — a twin manufactured through trick photography — and together they pore over images of the trip. They thread a projector and turn its historical spotlamp into the waiting lens of the camera, marking the beginning of Kitchener-Berlin’s second movement, entitled A Veiled Flight. This movement is marked by discontinuity and an apparent random succession of events. It is begun by miners working underground, who unearth bridesmaids and horses, family rituals of touch, an Imax film-shoot staging native rituals, and the filmmaker himself, crouched over his desk in contemplation. It closes with a cave ceremony lit by candles; the furtive rock etchings a reminder of private manufactures where the division of signs and the events they depict seem less inevitable than today. A Veiled Flight is also comprised of marks like these, expressionistic outpourings that represent an unconscious flow. It is an expiration of memories redolent with mythology and association, a rite of purification that looks to begin again beneath the earth’s surface, in the shadowy enclosures of histories that may be shared without being understood. This film asks that its two halves be brought together like the two names of its title — the haunting historical stalk of its opening movement joined with the unconscious lure of the second, both combining to frame a portrait of ruin and restoration.

river (15 min b/w 1992) is a geographical portrait. Photographed over the course of a decade in three distinct styles, it is a meditation on the way technology mediates encounters with the natural. It marks, above all, a return to a childhood pastoral retreat; its slow moving rhythms bear its observer in a contemplative embrace of overhanging wood and summery intentions. river’s first movement reveals a fishing excursion, the lush hues of a sun-inspired afternoon drifting easily in the glassy mirror of the river’s flow, its restful solitude untroubled by the ravages of an industrialized south. Humanity is glimpsed in edges and peripheries; a paddle drips concentric rows along the water’s surface, a hand lowers anchor; a fly is cast against a soaring treeline. These passages are silent, meditative, and idyllic — a chained series of lap dissolves easing the passage of an afternoon’s watchful rest. The second scene is markedly different. Photographed in black-and-white video, it continually treks downstream, its overexposure granting an unearthly quality to the surroundings. But because the boat is rudderless, left to follow the river’s current while Hoffman stands filming on the prow, it soon encounters a variety of natural obstacles — trunks and rocks arise from the river’s surface to impede passage. The microphone rests on the boat’s bottom, so each obstacle occasions a loud and often hilarious track of scraping and bumping. This sound contrasts with the sublime pictorial record of the scene. Together, image and sound produce a kind of pastoral slapstick, the journey’s romantic inclinations betrayed by the physical evidence of the voyage itself. river’s third movement draws its opening sections together, refilming the lyric impressions of the opening off a rear screen, employing the same crude black-and-white video camera used to photograph the flotational trek of the second movement. The final movement runs inside the river itself, diving below water to glimpse the sunstroked grounds of its descent, aqueous fronds waving in the light of afternoon. Sharp movements abound here, in contrast to the stoic solidity of the first passage or the slow-moving drift of the second. The camera darts beneath the waves in a gestural cadence finally extinguished by a blinding white light, then seeks its source of illumination in a blank passage that signifies beginning and end, the addition of colour, the simultaneous occurrence of all experience, the filmic equivalent of the sublime.

Taken together these seven films constitute a remarkable journey of first person cinema. This cycle marks a life from its beginnings to middle age, from photographs used to hide as much to declare, towards a showdown with imaging technologies. Throughout, Hoffman’s impulse is to unearth and lay bare, to share secrets, so long buried, which separate past and present. To re-animate the dead world in order to mourn it more perfectly. To re-member.

(Originally published in Media News, Sheridan College, 1988)

by June Hodgson and Mike White

Rated amongst the best Canadian Indepen­dent filmmakers, Philip Hoffman has ostensibly been classified as a documentary filmmaker. However, his unique style transcends negative stereotypes once thought to be inescapable.

Speaking to Vox Magazine in November of 1989, Hoffman said, “As someone born and raised in Canada, the films that I saw when I was growing up were documentaries. However, I don’t want to make films in the same way that documentarians make films. On the other hand, I can’t pretend that it is not important to me or it hasn’t affected me. So, I work in a sort of blend of documentary and experimental.”

Currently teaching film in the Media Arts Program of Sheridan College, Hoffman is entering his thirteenth year as a filmmaker. Born in Kitchener, Ontario, Hoffman nurtured his youthful interest in photography and writing by building his own darkroom. Receiving a Bachelor of Arts at Wilfrid Laurier University, he then studied at Sheridan with filmmaker Rick Hancox.

His 1978 film debut, On The Pond, runs nine minutes and is largely a collection of black-and-white still photographs. It is the first in what Hoffman calls a “cycle of films” – all of them autobiographical and none of them derived from a script. To produce a film without a script is a Hoffman trademark. Instead, he pieces together images filmed over a period of time and connects them through a personal narrative. For example, The Road Ended At The Beach, finished in 1983, compiles events in Hoffman’s life over eight years. Remarkably, his films are cohesive and complete state­ments, in spite of his seemingly undisciplined approach. Hoffman calls this “controlled chaos”. He carries a Super 8 camera with him always and what he films may eventually become part of a future production. It is a slow, labourious process. Hoffman believes it is the little things in everyday life which are the most important and most worthy of being documented. “Filmmaking becomes a process of things that happen in life,” he says.

Hoffman’s latest film, Kitchener Berlin, concludes the “cycle”. Here he examines his father’s German heritage via comparisons of Kitchener, Ontario (named Berlin prior to World War II), and Berlin, Germany. Hoffman says, unlike his previous films, Kitchener Berlin has more to do with the times than with people. It is less personal than passing through/torn formations (1987).  Completed in 1989, Kitchener Berlin was produced with the help of Sheridan graduates. Steadicam work was done by Colleen Graham and Bruce Johnson did the sound. Prior to returning to Sheridan in the fall of 1990, Hoffman took his films and Super 8 camera globe trotting. He led a two-week-long workshop at Finland’s Helsinki University of Art and Design. Hoffman also attended screenings of his work in Germany, England, and at Toronto’s Festival of Festivals. Of all of his excursions, Hoffman says Finland left the most indelible mark. Not because the people there are similar to Canadians, but because their primary struggle is similar to ours. “(Finnish) people live in the shadow of the USSR, dwarfed like Canadians are by the US. Finland’s history has been grappling with the USSR.

Disenchantment with the United States is a recurring topic in conversation with Hoffman. He believes that young people do not see enough shorts, experimental film and documentaries and he is disappointed by the predominance of American television in Canadian homes. Hoffman predicts that this situation may lend itself to creating a stronger film underground. “When the voice is taken away, people will go underground.”

To date, Hoffman does not need to work on an underground level. While he would like the National Film Board to put more of its budget towards independent filmmakers, he has managed to go from strength to strength over twelve years of filmmaking and he shows no sign of losing interest.

by Peter Harcourt

While a student at Sheridan, Philip Hoffman was part of that burgeoning group of filmmakers, including Richard Kerr and Mike Hoolboom, who came to be known as the Escarpment School. He returned to Sheridan Collegeas a full-time instructor in 1986, and later, joined the film and video department at York University in 1999. Every summer since 1994, Hoffman has run his own craft-centered film workshop at Mount Forest, Ontario.

If, according to Mike Hoolboom, “the Escarpment School typically conjoins memory and landscape in a home-movie, documentary-based production that is at once personal, poetic and reflexive,” Hoffman inflects these priorities in a distinctly personal way. If the works of Rick Hancox repeatedly return to the sites of his youth, Hoffman’s entail an archaeological journey toward unknown places and unfamiliar times.

Almost without exception, Hoffman’s work involves exorcism and espousal, from the shuffling off of inadequate ideas concerning his sense of self in the early films (On the Pond, 1978; The Road Ended at the Beach, 1983) to a Buddhist-like reconciliation with the inevitability of loss and death that characterizes his later works: Somewhere Between Jalostotitlan & Encarnacion (1984); ?O, Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film) (1986); Kitchener-Berlin (1990) and What these ashes wanted (2001). Hoffman contests the claim to the truth characteristic of conventional documentaries; ?O, Zoo! handles these themes with great playfulness, whereas both passing through/torn formations (1998) and What these ashes wanted confront them directly, without irony. passing through/torn formations took Hoffman to Europe in a search of the origins of his mother’s family. If a sense of doubling occurred in ?O, Zoo! and in the very title of Kitchener-Berlin…

And if death and dying is a presence in many of these works, it arrives unexpectedly at the end of Destroying Angel (1998), a film co-directed by Hoffman’s friend Wayne Salazar that celebrates Salazar’s homosexual marriage in spite of his ongoing struggle with AIDS. Suddenly there is a phone call. A candle flickers out. Hoffman must hurry home because of the imminent death of Marian McMahon, his companion of many years who is ill with cancer. The full exploration of this relationship and its sudden loss become the poignant affirmation of What these ashes wanted. Hoffman has stated that his desire was “to illuminate the conditions of her death… the mystery of her life and the reason why, at the instant of her passage, I felt peace with her leaving… a feeling I no longer hold.” The catalogue for the Toronto Images Festival described the film this way: “What these ashes wanted is not a story of surviving death, but rather of living death through a heightening of the quotidian moments of everyday experience.”

The complete works of Philip Hoffman incontestably establish him as an independent filmmaker of intricate artistic achievement and philosophical depth.

by Ronald Heydon

Day One
Writing the first words, always something of a mystery. Might as well begin at the beginning. Michael Sprinkler in The End of Autobiography traces the history of the word ‘autobiography’ to the end of the eighteenth century. The Oxford dictionary credits Southey with the first usage in 1809, and the French Larousse attributes the French form to a derivation from the English. Prior to the eighteenth century, works that are today labeled autobiographies were known as confessions, memoirs, journeaux in times.

Autobiography, the inquiry of the self into its own origin and history, is always circumscribed by the limiting conditions of writing, of the production of a text… Autobiography must return perpetually to the elusive centre of selfhood buried in the unconscious, only to discover that it was already there when it began… The origin and end of autobiography converge in the very act of writing… for no autobiography can take place except within the boundaries of a writing where concepts of subject, self and author collapse into the act of producing a text. (Sprinkler, p. 342)

Day Two
My first conscious encounter with landscape came in Saskatchewan, when I was nine or ten. On a bright, mid-summer day, I crossed the highway that encircled the city and entered the wheat fields. I walked for hours, gradually removing my clothes because of the heat. I remember the wheat scraping slightly the child’s flesh. I remember seeing no one and nothing but wheat and golden sun for miles. People have been known to panic in such conditions. In such solitude (and in each direction the same view) one either feels incredibly importance or insignificance. The feeling I had was communion.

In The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes D.W. Meinig writes that landscape is a technical term used by artists and earth scientists, architects and planners, geographers and historians. It is an ambiguous term, elusive. Landscape is, first of all, the impressions of our senses as well as the logic of our sciences. It is related to, but not identical with, environment. Landscape is defined by our vision, and interpreted by our minds.

In one of the books I recently read (was it New and Naked Land by Ronald Rees?) describing the frontier landscape of western Canada, the author referred to early survey expeditions undertaken to determine if the prairies were habitable. The Plains Indians had roamed there for centuries and one of the surveyors (1857) wrote in his journal: “Apart from various trails, the Indians left the prairie unmarked.”

The land, after first having been ignored (by earlier expeditions), explored and then appropriated, was later treated as a commodity. It was surveyed, sectioned off and given away in parceled bits to incoming Europeans.

“Apart from various trails, the Indians left the prairie unmarked.”
Does the landscape remember? Can we talk of land and memory?

Day Three
Heard trumpeter Lester Bowie’s jazz interpretation of It’s Howdy Doody Time. Great title for an autobiography! Went to a party at Steve’s (from sound class) last weekend. Most of the MA students were there. I started asking others about ‘referential productivity’ (from one of Nichols articles) but no one had a clue. Rick has given me a video copy of the Philip Hoffman films to view for class presentation on the 10th of November. Now I must find a friend with a VCR.

Day Four
The closer I look at ‘autobiography,’ the more infinite it appears.  There are four hundred years of it! Rick has set up the agenda so that I’m to defend the notion of autobiography in film. Does it need defense? Do the others understand? Does documentary only promote a cause? Expose malfunction? Couldn’t all this be applied to self? What about autobiographical documentary as therapy?

Day Five
In an interview, Hoffman says his experience taught him the value of the filmmaking process as much as the finished work. He gathers ‘pieces of evidence’—films, videotapes, audio recordings, written diaries—which are reworked to create a meaningful understanding of past events. It’s only while editing that patterns emerge. But this process of reflection and revision is extended to the viewer, who is asked to witness both events and their re-construction. This ‘experimental’ work allows an ambiguity which permits the spectator to bring in remembrances from their own lives.

I view On the Pond (1978) his first film. Family album photos are juxtaposed with images of a young boy playing a solitary hockey game, on the pond. Still photos of hockey teams appear in succession  as the boy becomes a teenager. Like my older brother, it appears the filmmaker lived his youth as part of a team. In the teen’s bedroom, a slow pan takes us from a projector and record player, the instruments of reproduction, to a book-shelf, a row of hockey trophies, and finally to the boy in bed, looking over a hockey scrapbook.

It’s the trophies that trigger my own personal flashbacks. Already the associations begin. I am from a family immersed in sports, a family of professionals. My older sister is a gym instructor and has played on Canadian volleyball teams for years. My older brother played every sport, won many trophies and now coaches football. My younger brother settles into karate and badminton (he was with Ontario’s Champions last year). Even my mother has trophies from her younger, basketball years. ‘Star’ they used to call her. I look over at the wall next to my desk at the picture of my father, taken just before his marriage. He played basketball for the Canadian team at the 1936 summer Olympics in Berlin. (I look for him walking with the teams whenever I see images from the Riefenstahl film, but have never yet found him.) They came in second after the Americans. In the photo, he is seated at a desk, wearing his Olympic leather jacket, pen in hand, about to sign some register or other. There are many trophies in my parents home, but none of them bear my name. I never won any. Obliged, like all the children, to play every sport (I could swim and skate before I could read) my own ‘boy’s landscape was outside the team.

Day Six
Autobiography is a cultural act, where language acts as a focusing glass. Eakins quotes Spengemann who insists that the autobiographer brings together the personal experiences of the writer with the shared values of a culture. He discerns a core belief in ‘individual identity’ which he conceives of as “an integrated, continuing personality which transcends the limitations and irregularities of time and space and unites all of one’s contradictory experiences into an identifiable whole.” (Eakins, p. 73) Do all cultures compress essential values and convictions in human models? Is ‘self-conception’ a problem in most cultures? Autobiography comes into its own at the end of the eighteenth century “in conjunction with the rise of individuality as the dominant ideal of personality.” This in itself is a complex issue—that we all possess unique selves, continuous identities which develop over the course of a lifetime. Eakins calls belief in individuality an anti-model sort of model:

In the opening lines of his Confessions, Rousseau captures the paradox at the heart of the notion of embracing individuality as a model, for he claims for his identity an absolute value of singularity.” I am like no one in the whole world,” he writes, while enjoining others to confess the uniqueness of their own selfhood with an equal candor.” I have displayed myself as I was.” His uniqueness, in other words, is exemplary, a model for others to follow. We must recognize accordingly that the very generality of such a model engenders problems of self-definition that every autobiographer and critic must face anew: what do we think our experience is really like, and how do we conceptualize the experiencing self? (Eakins, p. 74)

Day Seven
“Oh, you write? You keep a journal?” a school chum asks. “Yes, and hand-written too. Not in the computer,” I am quick to add. I’m old-fashioned. I like the texture of the page, the written word. Sure it’s ‘time consuming,’ but so is watching television. Handwriting is like a snapshot, it conveys mood through style. My writing is sometimes harried, sometimes slow and methodical; sometimes in black ink from my father’s fountain pen, sometimes in spur-of-the-moment ball point.

“Oh, you write? Are you so important?” I have been asked in the past, for I have kept a journal since leaving Saskatchewan. But journal writing is so much more than this. It has little to do with fame, importance, ‘posterity.’ The journal is a work place. Asked by CBC’s Brave New Waves to join a panel on journal writing, my initial response was yes, of course. Asked to read from my journal I quickly changed my mind. “But why not?” asks the organizer. “It’s my own personal working out of private dilemmas,” I answer, “not always for another’s eyes, let alone ears!” Then I wrote a piece in the journal, a ‘working out’ of the dilemma of a public text. I decide I could present this piece on the CBC (though probably they’ll want something more revealing.) Katz, in the Art Gallery of Ontario catalogue on autobiographical film, says that a journal brings one face to face with the meaning of one’s personal existence—there, before one’s eyes, and collected in one’s own handwriting. A journal helps to put one’s life in focus. Can I present this? I consult my agenda and see that I have an art history presentation the very next day—my most ambitious project and the one for which I’m least prepared. I decide I can’t do both so I cancel the radio show. Missed opportunity? Story of my life.

“Oh, you write?” Remembering that time in New York, summer of 92, just after Raymond Carver passed away. There was an obituary in the New York Times which I quickly copied out before my taxi arrived to take me to the Port Authority terminal. The friend who had showed it to me, not realizing I had already copied it by hand, said he would photocopy it and mail it to me. “It’s OK, I already have it,” I told him. “You wrote it out?” he nearly gasped, as if I’d wasted so much energy. Of course his vehement reaction might seem relevant if the obituary had been a full page of text, but it was just the following:

I don’t know why people write stories.

Raymond Carver said he wrote them

because he was drunk a lot, and his kids

were driving him crazy, and a short story

was all he had concentration for.

Sometimes, he said, he wrote them in a parked car.

Day Eight
Should a camera record death? There is no narrator in Hoffman’s Somewhere Between Jalostotitlan and Encarnacion (1984) but there is a narrative in the form of intertitles that resemble Japanese haiku poetry. This story takes place in Mexico where Hoffman chances across a dead Mexican youth surrounded by children. It begins:

Looking through the lens at passing events

I recall what once was and consider what might be

We never see the dead youth, but read via intertitles that the filmmaker has put his camera down. While the intertitles tell the story of this encounter, the ‘walking’ camera enters a village landscape, follows a textured wall overlaid with religious icons and paintings, and then a street procession (are we back in Ontario or still in Mexico?). A lone saxophone wails as if recounting the sad, difficult emotions. The hand-held camera pulls the spectator into the scene.

The little girl with big eyes waits by her dead brother

I am suddenly in a different scene. I am eighteen years of age and hitching around Europe. I am somewhere between Modena and Florence, seated in a medium-sized truck with a young Italian of about my age, who also prefers the back roads to the autoroute. He speaks no English while I manage just a smattering of Italian and French. With much hand gesturing and laughter he tells me that not only does he have a girlfriend, but that she is pregnant (la luna, la colline, capische?). Just ahead of us on the narrow road, an older man on a bicycle. We try to drive around him but the man turns left (doesn’t he hear the truck?) and we drive right over top of him. We sit there, immobile and white. There is not a sound. I get out of the truck and see children running from a neighboring farm. The man is dead. The young Italian can’t face him, he stands and weeps. I hold him and watch the children’s silent faces that look at us as if we were murderers. “It was an accident,” I want to say, but don’t even know the words. I thought I would never forget the look on those young faces, but I did forget until Hoffman’s film brought them back. I understand his ethical dilemma at filming death. What amazes me is his ability to make a thing of beauty from his coming to terms with it.

Day Nine
“Maybe I’m just more observational than the average person,” I say to myself, trying to find some context for the constant cruising, the way I engage others on the street. I don’t just look at people as I ride by on the bike but rather provoke a response. Maybe I’m spending too much time alone.

I did get to see a Dutch documentary film entitled The Ditvoorst Diaries. Back in the early 70s, Ditvoorst, the filmmaker, had been compared with Godard. Not long after his last film Witte Waan (White Madness) he returned to the town of his birth and drowned himself, exactly like a character in his first film Paranoia. It was a strange film to see on a Sunday afternoon, and we were only six people in the whole cinema. Much of the text for the film was taken directly from his diaries.

An incredible snowstorm the first of November. The following day the tree branches are laden with snow in the bright early-morning sun. Orange and black balloons remain tied to a tree in the neighbor’s yard. A little snowman now stands by the sidewalk, next to a discarded jack o’lantern.

Our human landscape is our unwitting autobiography, reflecting our tastes, our values, our aspirations, and even our fears in tangible, visible form… The cultural record we have ‘written in the landscape’ is liable to be more truthful that most autobiographies because we are less self-conscious about how we describe ourselves… There are no secrets in the landscape. (Peirce F. Lewis, The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes)

Day Ten
The idea ‘to defend’ Hoffman’s methodology leads to other questions: what is documentary film anyway? Can it be experimental? Can something become so personal it’s no longer documentary? Who decides these things? Most docs unwrap issues: poverty, racism, child abuse, hunger. These are worthy topics, so why in my communications MA, have I steered away from TV news and opted for documentary film, sound, art and identity? Art demands becoming more of who you really are. Not just the exposure of an issue, some ‘master narrative,’ but allowing local concerns, personal issues, to surface. And if some of that’s labeled ‘experimental’ well, I’ll deal with labels later. What was it Cocteau said while adapting George Auric’s music to one of his early films? Something about scrambling the pages and using the notion of chance, which might reveal another way of interpreting the material. In that tension, some new aspect might arise. What is learning if not a sense of discovery?

It was in Claudia Gorbman’s book, discussing film music and image, that she called the relationship between music-image and music-narrative “mutual implication.” Could any music accompany a film? Of course!

Whatever music is applied to a film segment will do something—will have an effect—just as any two words will produce a meaning different from each used separately. Kracauer’s reactions to a drunken movie-house pianist from his youth, whose inattention to the screen resulted in pleasingly unorthodox audiovisual combinations, recall the Surrealist’s delight in the fortuitous encounters between two unlikely entities. Jean Cocteau actually scored some of his films on the principle of what he called ‘accidental synchronization.’ He took George Auric’s music, carefully written for particular scenes in the film, and applied them to different scenes entirely. Whether the relation between sound and picture is deliberate or not (surrealist word-games vs. traditional poetic activity, the drunken pianist versus a score by John Williams), their collaboration will generate meaning. Image, sound effects, dialogue and music-track are virtually inseparable during the viewing experience; they form a combinatoire of expression. (Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies)

Why can’t learning be like the viewing experience? It was Jim Lane who equated the ideology of ‘the personal as political’ with autobiographical documentaries. He said they moved between life and representation, and were as much about the genre itself, as the people who made them.

Even Eakin equated the writing of autobiography (the “art of self-invention”) with culture, in the sense that no writing, no matter how private, exists in isolation. It is made up of shared words. It exists “in engagement with the pressures that life and culture entails.”

Day Eleven
Hoffman’s early interests related to photography and place. His pictures are the establishing shots of his life. The landscape sequences in passing through/torn formations were places he traveled in his youth. The remembering of that time, he says, is essential to his work. “Only now I must deal with those moments of discovery using the camera.” The Road Ended at the Beach (1983) was the result of several years of hitching back and forth across the country, not only experimenting with image making, but also struggling with the conventions of documentary. One reviewer wrote that he uses failure (in that film) to make his strongest points about the convergence and intermingling of anticipation and event. He was apparently spurred on by Kerouac’s life “on the road.”

I remember the jazz essay I wrote—the one based on Pierre Bourdieu’s The Aristocracy of Culture, in which he expounded on taste (“manifested preferences”) and the way, according to “educational capital,” cultural products were consumed. I was trying to relate all this to the jazz fan—The Construction of a Jazz Fan in the Post-Bop Era of the 1950s or: Jazz is a Language/Culture is a Game. Ambitious kid! Trying to adapt Bourdieu to the Beats. More interested in the music and those tapes of Kerouac’s poetry.

“…tortured by sidewalks — starved for sex and companionship — open to anything – ready to introduce a new world with a shrug.” (Kerouac, The Beat Generation)

“Miles Davis, leaning against the piano, fingering his trumpet with a cigarette hand—working—making raw iron sound like wood – speaking in long sentences like Marcel Proust.” (Kerouac, The History of Bop)

Day Twelve
I go to Vanier Library in search of the Katz book on film and autobiography. I notice that it has been checked out until the end of November. At the front desk, I ask the fellow if he can let me see who has the book, as it may be someone in my class. “We can’t do that!” he says. “It’s against our rules.” “Well, just look the other way”, I said, “It’s happened before.” He types in the number of the book, and then my ID, then nonchalantly shows me the screen. “Seeing is believing,” he smiles. “The book is checked out… to you!” All the books I have are entitled autobiography anyway. And I have so many. But this is the height of absurdity, running after books I already have. Must slow down.

Day Thirteen
I prefer to write at sunrise. It’s quiet and I can greet my ideas, reflections, impressions (the state of mind to write this) like an old friend. I think that if I wrote at night I would sound desperate. In the morning I reconstruct and face another day.

Day Fourteen
“Art is not a mirror but a hammer,” John Grierson wrote in the early 1930s, though it is his definition of documentary as “the creative treatment of actuality,” that is most often quoted. Bill Nichols in Voice in Documentarydiscusses the evolution of documentary, how it organizes the materials presented to us, and how the interaction of filmic codes produce meanings. Nichols suggests that contemporary filmmakers have lost their voice (i.e. replaced it with mere observation and unquestioned empiricism), and sets out to fashion his historical overview in order to advise filmmakers how to make documentaries that will more closely correspond to a contemporary understanding of ‘our’ position (whose?) within the world so that effective political/formal strategies for describing and challenging that position can emerge. His concern is how to understand images of the world as speech about the world, and how to place that speech within formal, experiential and historical contexts.

Now let’s face facts—the number of filmmakers who actually work this way can probably be counted on one hand. And though he gives an excellent summary of the four types of documentary film (only four?)—expository, observational, interactive and self-reflexive—I can’t seem to place Philip Hoffman anywhere, save the self-reflexive, and then only up to a point. Nichols defines the self-reflexive as a strategy (right away a problem), where the representation of the historical world becomes itself the topic of cinematic mediation.

It’s odd, that Nichols skims over the expository, voice-of-God mode, as his article exemplifies this approach. All his arguments lead to the self-reflexive mode as the only one worth pursuing. So why is television news and most documentaries still caught in the expository mode? I think the best line in the whole article comes right at the beginning: “The comfortably accepted realism of one generation seems like artifice to the next.”

Day Fifteen
Today I only feel like quoting.

“The aim is to depict the place as some sort of historical palimpsest and/or the corollary of this, an exposition of a state of mind.” (Patrick Keiller, The Poetic Experience of Townscape and Landscape, p. 43)

It seems, then, that making moving pictures of spaces and places involves the same sort of consideration as any other picture making – perspective, framing, proportion, left and right, and so on – even when the camera is moving, and especially when it is not. The virtues of this approach can be seen in those of Vermeer’s paintings where there always seems to be more shown of the corner of the room than there actually is. In other words, the picture of the corner of the room is so good that we can infer the rest of the room from it. (P. Keiller, ibid, p. 47)

The deeper I delve the more complex it becomes. What was it Diane Arbus said, “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.”

Day Sixteen
Fellini passed away last week. Big state funeral on the news. I notice, on a record jacket I have of selected music from his films, some quotes from Fellini on Fellini. “I am my own still-life.” “I am a film.” “Everything and nothing in my work is autobiography.”

Last week I gave my class presentation on autobiography and documentary film. As if I wasn’t nervous enough, Phil Hoffman was also present. He was very relaxed though, and afterwards, we had a good talk. But trying to cogently present the complicated theories surrounding autobiography was another matter. I started skipping paragraphs, darting across the page, scanning for the essential, unsuturing. I felt I was watching the paper crumble before my eyes.

After passing through/torn formations most of the class left on break and I stayed to speak with Hoffman. I told him the story (which suddenly jarred in my memory during his film) of my own grandfather. Originally from a tiny hamlet of a place in England called Hook Norton, he emigrated to Canada with his family and never returned there. I never knew his wife, my grandmother. She was a French woman, and died shortly after giving birth to their sixth child. My grandfather raised his six children alone. When I was hitching around Europe as an eighteen year old I decided to visit Hook Norton, which is just north of London, though the only Heydons there were on the gravestones. I took a few black and white photos, staying for a few days, and spoke with the oldest woman of the village who remembered my ancestors. I even copied out the record of christenings at the church going back over two hundred years. The next year, back in Canada, I visited my grandfather, who still lived in Windsor with two of his unmarried daughters. I showed him the photos—silly, Instamatic pictures—and told him of my adventures there. My grandfather was a big man, and watched me with steady eyes as I spoke. I spent three or four days there and then left on a Sunday evening for Toronto. The next morning I received the telephone call from my aunt: “Come back. Your grandfather passed away last night in his sleep.”

There were a few students who also listened to the story and one of them (Carolyn?) suggested that it was my fault that he died! “You probably triggered something in memories long buried.” Philip found it interesting but only said, “Looks like you’ve got enough there to make a film yourself.”

Day Seventeen
Hoffman made ?O,Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film) ostensibly to document Greenaway’s making of A Zed and Two Noughts. The film however (as Nichols suggests as the purpose of self-reflexive documentary) is concerned with the conditions of how it was made. He connects Canadian film history with references to Grierson (“that old battleaxe”) to a personal, diaristic travel experience. Landscapes vary from a small square in a Dutch city to a static shot of one of Greenaway’s outdoor locations to lion cages in the Rotterdam zoo. Like his Mexican film, a death occurs, only this time it is an elephant that is dying. The question of filming this death is the same however. The screen is left blank as the narrator describes the event. How to categorize a film that pokes fun at conventions while seriously searching for new forms; and asks us to create these forms with him.The spectator is part of his ethical dilemma. His dilemma is also ours.

Day Eighteen
Some years ago, while preparing a demo tape of a radio broadcast (which turned out well, as I was hired immediately at CKUT), I included several quotes from an autobiographer who has influenced me greatly. PeterHandke’s The Weight of the World is a text made of reflections, observations, self-inventions.

Washing a shirt in the washbasin when all is still and the heart is heavy.

Someone has written me a letter in which he apologizes for not having phoned me instead.

A television talk-show host laughs aloud at something, quite spontaneously—but all the same he forces himself to laugh into the microphone.

A little while ago (evening) for the first time in ever so long—while standing at the kitchen sink eating grapes and spitting the seeds into my hand—I managed to think of a future.

Independent film and video artists, Renov tells us, are asking themselves questions about the representation of their own subjectivity, in which history and subjectivity become mutually defining categories. Renov calls this “embroiling of subject in history” the new autobiography.

Day Nineteen
“It is a warm grey afternoon in August. You are in the country, in a deserted quarry of light-grey devonian limestone in southern Ontario. A powdery luminescence oscillates between rock and sky…”

I can see through Chris Dewdney’s words, through the text, the poem, through the words on the page. I am a spectator. I am also a reader. I am the viewer in the dark, before a black screen, listening to these words, theintroduction to passing through/torn formations. And I am glad Hoffman left the screen black. Some things are better left unshown, where the landscape of imagination and memory can more easily reside.

Hoffman describes the peopled landscape as “an inevitable collision between the old and new worlds, like two great landscapes colliding, erupting… Some people in my family just got caught at the epicentre…”

Day Twenty
There are many family voices in passing through/torn formations, as well as a relentless movement of overlapping images. Sometimes we see the same image/scene from different angles. This restatement of imagery (never exactly the same) Hoffman compares to oral history (which changes through the retelling), or to the literary method of Gertrude Stein.

It was Stein who said, back in 1934, that to understand modern painting, one had to fly over the plains of the Mid-West.

With the many changes in the dominant systems of communication that affect our culture as a whole, will film and video replace writing as our chief means of recording, informing and entertaining? Is there a cinematic equivalent for autobiography and, after four hundred years, is it close to extinction? Should I be angry with Philip Hoffman? Is writing to be formally displaced? “The unity of subjectivity and subject matter,” Elizabeth Brusswrites in Eye for I (Making and Unmaking Autobiography in Film, “seems to be shattered by film; the autobiographical self decomposes, schisms, into almost mutually exclusive elements of the person filmed (entirely visible, recorded and projected) and the person filming (entirely hidden; behind the camera eye).” What is there in language to explain its peculiar fitness for autobiographical expression? Can the autobiographical ‘I’ survive the move from text to film?

Again I’m faced with Descartes, as Bruss begins her search: “The more radical his doubts (in the Meditations) the more certain the being of the doubter—he never considered whether the ‘doubter’ might not be the product rather than the producer of the doubt. (p. 298)”

She offers three parameters to autobiography: 1) truth value (autobiography is consistent with other evidence; it is sincere); 2) act value (autobiography is a personal performance); 3) identity value (the logically distinct roles of author, narrator and protagonist are conjoined).

Like the sentence I have been composing, language allows the same individual who plays the role of speaker to serve as his own referent as well—the speaking subject and the subject of the sentence are conflated—which is crucial to autobiography. In film, Bruss notes, the autobiographical self begins to seem less like an individual being and more like an abstract ‘position’ that appears when a number of key conventions converge. Film, in other words, offers a new variable—the choice between ‘staging the truth,’ or recording it directly. Can we call a film sincere, she asks. Can a film shot (apart from vocal accompaniment) express doubt?

But all film is manipulation, I want to cry out at her. And hasn’t Hoffman overcome this very thing?

I look at Kitchener-Berlin (1989), Hoffman’s latest film. I am immersed in family history—landscape, memory, time—and I go for a long bike ride afterwards to ponder. I think of my grandfather, who came to Canada from the Ukraine many years ago. He came to our house one day and dumped my grandmother at our front door. “Here,” he said to my mother in Ukrainian (he never did learn English), “Take your mother. She’s sick. She can’t work anymore.” Or at least, that’s the version my mother tells, not in anger, but in the hopes I’ll understand. “It’s their way.” Three weeks later, my grandmother was dead. I know it had something to do with cancer, but what I remembered most (as a young child), is that she died in my bed. I had to sleep in my sister’s room. Why do I think of this grandfather who couldn’t even talk to me, who could only say “hello” (in English) and pat my head?

I go out for a drink. Filled with books, papers and ideas. I stop at a singles bar in the Plateau where there are many people, voices, music, smoke, shouting and laughter. But tonight, there’s no one here I know. Standing alone, watching other casually cruise and flirt, I remember my teen years on the prairies.

Tonight, in the sky

Even the stars

Seem to whisper

To one another.

(Issa, Oraga Haru/The Year of my Life)

Day Twenty-one
Last day. One final glance to that Bruss article. In studying, we don’t just read the things we want to hear.

It is doubtful, she remarks, that the effects of shooting, editing and lighting are capable of expressing what we conventionally call ‘personality’ to the degree that language can. Mieke Bal has recently proposed a separate category (to represent point-of-view) of ‘focalizer’, as distinct from ‘narrator,’ to make the different qualities of these vantage points clearer.

There is a total absence of ‘identity-value’ in film. While speaking, ‘I’ merges easily with another. But the film spectator is always out of frame, creating an impassable barrier between the person seeing and the person seen. Viewing films could relate to our sense of privacy, anonymity—viewing, yet feeling unseen. She quotes Cavell: “We do not so much look at the world as look out at it, from behind the self.”

As Hoffman himself noted, “when photography was invented, painting changed; but photography never replaced landscape painting. If avant-garde film is dying in its struggle to survive, let’s celebrate its death and make it into something else.” Film could offer a new way of experiencing ourselves. Bruss concludes:

Film simply shares-or better, articulates—the dilemmas of an entire culture now irrevocably committed to complex technologies and intricate social interdependencies. To make the means of film human without falling back on outworn humanisms, to achieve more fluid modes of collaboration and diversity rather then the standardized expression, to establish practices in which ‘I’ may no longer exist in the same way but nonetheless cannot escape my own participation—these concerns are not unique to film but among the most fundamental problems that confront ‘the age of mechanical reproduction’ as a whole.

by Elizabeth Johnston, edited by Karyn Sandlos and Mike Hoolboom

Book Review

LANDSCAPE WITH SHIPWRECK is a book that acts upon the reader with an uncanny ability to engage both the emotions and the intellect. Quotations from diverse sources are liberally sprinkled throughout thebook, point and counterpoint, making a sort of contrapuntal music. Lifting you up, confirming, lulling, exciting and sometimes terrorizing you. So many times I had to stop and pluck a quote from this rich veinand write it into my journal for safekeeping. What Hoolboom and Sandlos say in their introduction is true:”By reading this book, you risk making this story your own.”

The story of a third-generation Canadian experimental filmmaker, Philip Hoffman, is literally (or academically) told to us in Peter Harcourt’s informative look at one member of the so-called Escarpment School. (Included in this school are filmmakers such as Rick Hancox, Carl Brown, Gary Popovich, Marian McMahon, Steve Sanguedolce and Richard Kerr.) “Born and raised along the craggy slopes of theCanadian Shield, their work typically conjoins memory and landscape in a home movie/documentary-based production that is at once personal, poetic and reflexive.”

A self-styled autobiographical filmmaker, Hoffman has been using 8 and 16 mm cameras to film his family since he was in his teens. Despite the very personal subject matter, Hoffman’s work is a testament to how the specific can be the universal. One of his first “assignments” was to film the corpse of his dead grandfather. (Although he did the filming, it was years before he could develop the film.) Death, and theabsences created by death, including the loss of memories, permeates Hoffman’s work as it does this anthology.

All of us struggle, at some level, to some degree, with identity, memory and the challenge of living in a world where every second all around us things are dying – every second dropping beyond our grasp. Simultaneously, Hoffman’s work performs the double role of magician and embalmer – recre­ating memory and in the very act of recreation fixing that memory as an embalmer fixes a body. This idea is beautifullyarticulated by various writers, but particularly in “Thin Ice” by Karyn Sandlos,”Notes on River” by Philip Hoffman, and Brenda Longfellow’s “Philip Hoffman’s Camera Lucida.”

Ronald Heydon’s “The Landscape Journal,” is indicative of the emotional responses in Landscape. Using Hoffman’s films as a springboard, Heydon ruminates on his own connec­tion to land, memory, and autobiography. In a particularly moving entry, Day 8, Heydon discusses whether a camera should record death, which is for Hoffman a central preoccu­pation. Hoffman’s film Somewhere between Jalostotitlan andEncarnacion is the source of this entry. In this film, there is no narrator, but intertitles tell us the story. At one point, the bus Hoffman is on stops because a boy has been killed in the road. Hoffman thought about filming the death, but decided not to and the resulting film is, in some measure, an attempt to come to terms with that decision and the lacuna it creates in the film itself. Heydon, watching the film, remembers his travels in Italy as an 18-year-old. He’d hitched a ride with a jocular man who preferred back roads to highways.

Just ahead of us on the narrow road, an older man on a bicycle. We try to drive around him, but the man turns left (doesn’t he hear the truck?) and we drive right over top of him. We sit there, immobile and white. There is not a sound. I get out of the truck and see children run­ning from a neighbouring farm. The man is dead. The young Italian can’t face him; he stands and weeps. I hold him and watch the children’s silent faces that look at us as if we were murderers… I thought I would never for­get the look on those young faces, but I did forget until Hoffman’s film brought them back.”

To film or not to film death, that is the ethical question that resurfaces throughout Landscape. In slightly more comic (or objective?) tones, this question is revisited in Hoffman’s documentary of Peter Greenaway’s A Zed & Two Noughts dur­ing the filming of which an elephant died on location at the Rotterdam Zoo. In Hoffman’s documentary, the story of the elephant dying is told over a black screen. The narrator says he filmed the elephant, but couldn’t bring himself to develop the film and so put it in the freezer. Yet, after the credits, there is a shot of an elephant getting up from the ground that throws into question the veracity and authenticity of the film.

While there is no doubt such treatment of actuality gives rise to ethical questions, the consensus seems to be (exempli­fied by Michael Zryd’s “Deception and Ethics in ?O, Zoo!,” and Polly Ullrich’s “The Workmanship of Risk” among others) that the censorship of such methods would deny filmmakers and viewers the opportunity for questioning the ways of the self. Hoffman explains it this way:

By means of the personal content of my films I seek to uncover subjective aspects of the way events are record­ed. Focusing on the way that l, as afilmmaker, can and do influence both form and content allows room for the viewer to reflect upon ways in which meaning is con­structed in film. Using the processes of reflection and revision, I seek to examine and express how we bring meaning to past and present lived experiences.

Hoffman’s films demand a sophisticated, or at least an open-minded viewer, one that, given the recent documentary scandals in Britain, does not yet exist in the mainstream.

In the act of reading this book, an open mind, a self­reflexive mind, will find itself transformed and changed. The old self will no longer exist. And, only after reading to the end will some things at the beginning become clear like the nature of this change and, also, the meaning of this rather odd statement:”In biblical times,” write Sandlos and Hoolboom,”there circulated rumours of a book so fearsome, so awful, that its reading would occasion the events it described, and end the world as it was known. I have no doubt that for Phil, this is that book. I pray he never reads it.”

I was nearly put off by that apocryphal introduction. It seemed too large a statement for any book to live up to let alone a ragtag anthology of”critics, architects, and builders.” I tell my students of fiction writing: You have to earn the right to use abstractions, cliches or exaggeration.To my delight, Sandlos and Hoolboom have earned that right. But, I don’t know that Philip Hoffman would feel things were over for him after reading this book since in the early nineties, he killed off the author in his own work and moved into collabo­rative installations, thereby rising from his own ashes. I sus­pect that Hoffman could use this book as confirmation of that transformation or at least keep it handy to stoke the fire needed for the next transformation.— POV

Elizabeth Johnston is POV’s resident book reviewer. She also freelances for major newspapers and teaches cinema in Montreal.