Philip Hoffman

By the Time We Got to Expo

Eva Kolcze, Philip Hoffman

A kinetic journey through Expo 67, revisiting Canada’s centennial through the symbols, choreographies, and built environments of the World’s Fair and its construction of (inter)nationalism. Reworking archival footage, By the Time We Got to Expo creates a vibrant collision of textures and forms in order to explore the surfaces, ideologies, and implications of the ‘meeting place’ that was Expo 67.

The Road Ended at the Beach

Philip Hoffman

Film images, stills and sound collected over six years coalesce in The Road Ended at the Beach. Hoffman interrogates both the journey, involving famed American photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank, and the process of its documentation as/in film.

Chimera

Philip Hoffman

“In 1989 I finished the film Kitchener-Berlin and put a close to a cycle of work which dealt directly with myself, and how self is expressed/constructed cinematically. At the same time I took my old super-8 camera out of the closet, and began collecting images, using the single-frame-zoom. Cubist in its visual delivery, the single-frame-zoom builds a splayed reality that brings together disparate vantage points simultaneously, and serves as the glue that blends and bonds peoples, places and spaces in Chimera.” (PH)

All Fall Down

Philip Hoffman

Mike Hoolboom

An experimental documentary that takes as its starting point a nineteenth century farmhouse in Southern Ontario, Canada, and asks the question "what has been here before?"

Destroying Angel

Philip Hoffman, Wayne Salazar

In attempting to deal with his HIV status, the narrator mixes his past and present to give us a portrait of friendships, family ties, and other intimate relationships.

Kokoro Is for Heart

Philip Hoffman

Kokoro Is for Heart features poet Gerry Shikatani and explores the relationships surrounding language, image and sound, set to the backdrop of a gravel pit. When I got the footage back from the lab I was disappointed because of the periodic flipping of the image. After screening the footage several times I realised that the malfunctioning camera rendered the filmed-nature unnatural ...and this poses questions: what is nature? What is natural? Ph

Passing Through/Torn Formations

Philip Hoffman

Christopher Dewdney, Philip Hoffman

1988 short film by Philip Hoffman.

?O, Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film)

Philip Hoffman

A "subversive engagement with documentary convention" centered on the production of Peter Greenaway's film A Zed and Two Noughts.

Lessons in Process

Philip Hoffman

Lessons in Process is an experimental documentary about a filmmaking workshop given by Canadian filmmaker/teacher Phil Hoffman, at the famed Internacional de Cine y Television, at San Antonio de Los Banos in Cuba. The film is a meditation on generations and legacies that touches on matters of responsibility and participation in the creation and circulation of images. Lessons in Process is at once a celebration of tradition, a self-examination, and an elegy.

ever present going past

Philip Hoffman

Filmmaker Philip Hoffman and poet Gerry Shikatani combine to make a cine-poem about the making of gardens, films and poems. Excerpts from Shikatani’s `First Book, Three Gardens of Andalucia’.

Sweep

Philip Hoffman, Sami van Ingen

Sweep is a road movie to memory, a realization of the need to review footsteps and past events which build myths. The camera gazes at the spaces in-between image and text, photography and memory, body and place. The surface texture of the film, like the land north of Lake Superior, is overdetermined by the discourse of territorialism, the cultural divisions of space and place framed and divided amid the ruins of history. An irritating buzz overlays parts of the soundtrack, signifying the hydro-electric development that has irreparably disrupted life in the north, while at the same time extending a modicum of material benefits. The filmmakers understand themselves as embodying this southern technocracy, and choose to turn the camera onto their own presence and progress of looking. Here, they work against the tendency, present since the days of Flaherty and in his more recent imitators, to objectify Aboriginal peoples within an unnameable (and thus exploitable) landscape.

On the Pond

Philip Hoffman

“Hoffman’s film is in the experimental film tradition of the personal diary although in this case a beautifully paced mixture of family photographs and dramatic reconstruction interwoven into a narrative that creates objective distance." (Michael O’Pray)

river

Philip Hoffman

"The Saugeen River was named Sauking, ‘where it all flows out,’ by the Ojibwa in the early 1800s. It runs into Lake Huron, in central Ontario. The place where I know it is twenty miles south of Owen Sound, near Williamsford, where I spent lots of time in my youth exploring. Over the past twelve years I’ve returned there to film, and collected these moments in a fifteen minute meditation called simply, river." (Philip Hoffman)

Ending 2

Isiah Medina, Philip Hoffman

Processed with conventional photo chemicals and the following flowers: magnolia blossoms, hyacinth, hydrangea, daffodil, rhododendron, pond algae, lilac, oregano (with blooms), comfrey (with blooms), roses, mint, goldenrod, hostas buds after flowering, and wild garlic seeds (a bowlful).

Kitchener-Berlin

Philip Hoffman

"As passing through/torn formations concerns his mother's family heritage, Kitchener-Berlin revolves around his father's family hometown. The slash and the hyphen in the titles suggest both severance from the past and connections to it, an ambivalence that is especially poignant for the descendants of the area's German settlers. The history of the area underpins the film, but refuses to bind it or restrict it from free association. Hoffman assembles a wide range of visual materials, including home movies, television news footage, and archival film, as well as his own characteristically enticing images, to build complex layers of superimpositions analogous to the impressions of memory." (Blaine Allen)

Inner circle

Isiah Medina, Philip Hoffman

The clean 16mm image is processed normally in a lab. Outdated film stock from the 1980s-90s which Peter Mettler recently gave Philip Hoffman accounts for superimpositions. The tinting and toning was done via 'green' processing with flowers. The shooting and hand developing with flowers was done by Hoffman. It was scanned and then digitally edited by Isiah Medina.