MIXING UP THE MEDICINE: FILM FARM 30TH ANNIVERSARY

@ OTHER CINEMA SAN FRANCISCO SEPT 21 2024

with Deirdre Logue, Brett Kashmere, Craig Baldwin, Phil Hoffman, Alfonso Alvarez, Annapurna Kumar – missing from photo: Maïa Cybelle Carpenter

Other Cinema Screening of Film Farm Films

Archive tour with Craig Baldwin September  21, 2024!

CANYON CINEMA SALON, SAN FRANCISCO

9/20/2024 – A Salon with Philip Hoffman

vulture & Film Farm Films (by Maïa Cybelle Carpenter & Markus Maicher). Program curated by Brett Kashmere: Continue reading MIXING UP THE MEDICINE: FILM FARM 30TH ANNIVERSARY

endings (2023) by Medina & Hoffman

endings endings by Isiah Medina & Philip Hoffman at Shapeshifter Cinema, Oakland September 2024.
Shapeshifters: Ellie Vanderlip, Gilbert Guerrero & Kathleen Quillian (missing from photo)
Phil & Deirdre @ Shapeshifter
Simon Fraser University, Vancouver Sept 2024 Programmer: Chris Chong, Screening Moderator: Terra Jean Long
Dim Sum with Chris Chong Chan Fui & Terra Jean Long in Vancouver
Film Farm 30 Year Retrospective at Other Cinema
At Other Cinema with Deirdre Logue, Brett Kashmere, Craig Baldwin, Phil Hoffman, Alphonso Alvarez, Annapurna Kumar – missing Maïa Cybelle Carpenter

Archive tour with Craig Baldwin September  21, 2024!

CANYON CINEMA SALON, SAN FRANCISCO

9/20/2024 – A Salon with Philip Hoffman

vulture & Film Farm Films (by Maïa Cybelle Carpenter & Markus Maicher). Program curated by Brett Kashmere: Continue reading endings (2023) by Medina & Hoffman

Deep 1 @ Simon Fraser University, B.C. & Ribalta Fest, Italy (Review)

Dim Sum with Chris Chong Chan Fui & Terra Jean Long in Vancouver
Simon Fraser University, Vancouver Sept 2024 Programmer: Chris Chong, Screening Moderator: Terra Jean Long

The Gāyatrī mantra of the Ṛigveda sets-up the entire short film: it is the mantra itself that creates the atmosphere of darkness, followed by the first creation: the tree, which contains the identity of darkness as if it were its visible matter…. (see below)                         “Deep 1” Ribalta Film Fest Review

`Deep 1′ preview

DEEP 1  (2023, 15 min, HDV or 35mm)

Deep 1 (2023)

Hoffman on `Deep 1′

more on Deep1 and Flowers #3

…more on Hoffman’s films

Stan Brakhage on `passing through/torn formations’

passing through/torn formations accomplishes a multi-faceted experience for the viewer—it is a poetic document of Family, for instance—but Philip Hoffman’s editing throughout is true to thought process, tracks visual theme as the mind tracks shape, makes melody of noise and words as the mind recalls sound.”

PASSING THROUGH/TORN FORMATIONS (1988)

passing through/torn formations (frame enlargement from 16mm reversal  orig A,B,C,D rolls)

`passing through/torn formations’ preview

Mike Hoolboom on `passing through/torn formations’

Hoffman’s sixth film in ten years, passing through/torn formations is a generational saga laid over three picture rolls that rejoins in its symphonic montage the broken remnants of a family separated by war, disease, madness and migration. Begun in darkness with an extract from Christopher Dewdney’s Predators of the Adoration, the poet narrates the story of ‘you,’ a child who explores an abandoned limestone quarry….The film’s theme of reconciliation begins with death’s media/tion—and moves its broken signifiers together in the film’s central image, ‘the corner mirror,’ two mirrored rectangles stacked at right angles. This looking glass offers a ‘true reflection,’ not the reversed image of the usual mirror but the objectified stare of the Other. When Rimbaud announces ‘I am another’ he does so in a gesture that unites traveller and teller, confirming his status within the story while continuing to tell it. It is the absence of this distance, this doubling that leads the Czech side of the family to fatality.

complete Cinema Canada review by Mike Hoolboom on `passing through/torn formations’ Continue reading Deep 1 @ Simon Fraser University, B.C. & Ribalta Fest, Italy (Review)

Deep 1 (2023)

Deep 1
Deep 1 (14:30, 2023)

Filmed over 2 years (2020-2022), at home and away, Deep 1 is a diaristic meditation, flower/plant processed and decayed with hyacinth and lichen extract. Winged and four legged animals, both wild and domestic, traverse the frame marked by a hand-made practice. Filmed in Mount Forest, Ontario and Dawson City, Yukon.  *available on digital & on 35mm

Analogica Festival, Bolzano, Italy 2024                                                  Playhouse Theatre, Hamilton, Ontario 2024                                              Prismatic Ground Film Festival New York 2024                        Shapeshifter Cinema, Oakland 2024                                                            Simon Fraser University, Vancouver 2024                                              Adhoc, Innis College Toronto, 2024                                                      Revolutions Per Minute Film Festival, Harvard U, Boston 2024            Ann Arbor Film Festival 2023, USA; Jury Award                                              Ribalta Experimental Film Festival 2023, Italy                                                  La Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión (EICTV) 2023, Cuba Strangloscope Festival, Brasil 2023                                                                16mm Film Festival, Mumbai, India 2023

`Deep 1′ preview

Opening audio passage from a recording of the “Gayatri Mantra” by mentor/friend Rup Chand (Ann Arbor 1979). He told me that his mother suggested he recite the words when he was in fear.

Om Bhur bhuvah svah                                                                                                          Tat savitur varenyam                                                                                                       Bhargo Devasya dheemahi                                                                                      Dheeyo yonah prachodayaat                                                                                  The Rigveda (10:16:3)

“Oh manifest and unmanifest, wave and ray of breath, red lotus of insight, transfix us from eye to navel to throat, under canopy of stars spring from soil in an unbroken arc of light that we might immerse ourselves until lit from within like the sun itself.”                         (translation from Sanskrit by Ravi Shankar)

About looking at things; envisioning a space “where we are not separated from other things.”  – R.H. Blyth

Deep 1 Frame enlargement from 16mm

“across the window,                                                                                                         birds and beasts look unaware                                                                                   of their decay” –Ph

Still Time in Philip Hoffman’s `Deep 1’ 

 by Lucia Ruggieri, Francesco D’Accia, Matteo Ricci                                          (Ribalta Experimental Film Festival, Italy)

The Gāyatrī mantra of the Ṛgveda sets-up the entire short film: it is the mantra itself that creates the atmosphere of darkness, followed by the first creation: the tree, which contains the identity of darkness as if it were its visible matter. Continue reading Deep 1 (2023)

Chimera – Philip Hoffman

Chimera is Hoffman’s most understated film that explores his two most common themes: death and chaos. And it is perhaps his most immediate film dealing with frozen moments, life transitions and fragments of memory. The shots are in constant movement and it makes the image blurred a good portion of the time; periodically, a readable moment will appear, just briefly, and then the movement continues. It’s a statement in chaos at its most heightened state. The world is blurry with only snatches of clarity—it’s moving fast with only glimpses of calm. You never know exactly where you are or what is going on, except for fleeting moments.”

From Impakt

Flowers #3 (Kissed by the Sun)

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

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

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

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

 

“From Film Lab to Film Farm” by Kim Knowles

EXCERPT from Film Lab to Film Farm by Kim Knowles (Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices, Palgrave MacMillan, 2021.)

Over the next few days, our world reduces to the contours of this barn and the surrounding fields, but I feel my mind expanding into new terrain. We are taught how to operate the Bolex camera, how to hand-process as negative and reversal with traditional chemistry, as well as eco-friendly formulas with local flowers and plants. We plunge ourselves into the colorful world of tinting and toning, the handmade and largely unpredictable processes that define such films as Jennifer Reeves’ We Are Going Home (1998), Eve Heller’s Behind This Soft Eclipse (2004) and Penny McCann’s Crashing Skies (2002). We experiment with solarization in the dark room, each of us secretly hoping to get results as striking as Chris Chong’s Minus (1999), an uncut stream of superimposed movements on a single roll of film that were apparently produced in one sleepless night at the barn.  read more

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

order book here

CFMDC Panel on Kim Knowles book “Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices” here

Film Farm 25th Anniversary 2019

Photo by Lu Zhang

Exhibition curated by Michelle Lovegrove Thomson

 

Kim Knowles talks about Film Farm at Tiff Bell Lightbox 2019; and Q & A

Screenings Curated by Chris Kennedy

Program 1: We Are Going Home

Program 2: Crashing Skies

Photo by Lu Zhang (Vipin Sharma & Cara Morton)
Photo by Lu Zhang  (vulture)
Photo by Lu Zhang
Photo by Lu Zhang
Photo by Lu Zhang
Photo by Lu Zhang

If there is life in the BARN: it will survive. Philip Hoffman interviewed by James Holcolme

Can you talk a little about the history of the land and buildings before they became a rural lab? Can you paint a textual picture of the landscape over the seasons and how the equipment is bedded down for the winter – what do you have to do to keep quite complex machines working and functional?

I got the property in the early 1990’s, with my partner at that time Marian McMahon, with the idea of creating a kind of school for image-making. The old stone house was built by Henry Chilton in the 1880’s, and had been used for farming ever since. The farm is approximately 50 acres, and some of it is used by my neighbours for farming purposes, in exchange for various things over the years… Erwin dug the pond and built a foundation for an extension to the house. Tom plows my lane and gives me a freezer of meat every year from his grass fed animals that graze on the land. We started the workshop in 1994 with Rob Butterworth, Tracy German and Marian McMahon, and at the time my neighbour had cows in the bottom of the barn, so we had mooing sounds echoing through the barn while we screened films! The old barn, built probably in the 1920’s is an old Mennonite constructed structure, held together solely by wooden pegs. Over the years my partner, Janine Marchessault, and I have had to maintain the barn by having our friend Jon Radojkovic, who’s an expert in timber frame barns, help to keep it standing, as the barn shifts. In 2007 he did a major repair, as the barn was shifting quickly. My neighbour Wayne put some cement posts at the back of the barn and Jon tightened some of the major beams using a permanent winching system, with thick wire, and replaced some beams by jacking the barn up…the jacking is done over a few months, raising the barn a fraction of an inch every week. So the barn is in a constant state of repair. Every winter the animals, the wind and snow take over the barn. We cover everything in tarp and hope the machines start up again in the spring!

Read the complete interview here.