Philip Hoffman

"A community workshop held by the Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film in Durham, Ontario, engages participants in a group phytogram creation collaboration. The resulting work suggests a long flow of what the phytogram 'founder,' Karel Doing, posits as a kind of vegetal 'being,' a springtime world beyond what we can know or judge." - Philip Hoffman

Completed in 2001, what these ashes wanted—which combines hand-processed film, video diaries, found sound, text and narration—is a ritual of grief that seems both shared and private. Our own stories of grief fill the gaps between Hoffman’s images of Egyptian tombs, wintertime frolics and insect activity.

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.

“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)

vulture sets its sights on farm animals, their surrounding flora, and the farming process. Static shots and slow-moving zooms follow the grazing animals in their minute inter-species exchanges. When left to roam together, the sensibilities of these "beasts" are allowed to surface.

The speculative tale of Canadian outsider musician Lewis and the belated discovery of his 1983 album "L'Amour". A love story composed in myth and song.

“The bus stopped on the Mexican highway, placing us in full view of a young boy, motionless, on the hot pavement. In this film, the incident is revealed through a poetic text, derived from my written journals. The poetry mixes primarily with Mexican streetscapes which compliment the text in a tonal sense. Most images are twenty-eight seconds long, the ‘breath’ of the 16mm Bolex camera. A lone saxophone (Mike Callich) weaves its way through the narrative, blending to make stronger the tomes and accentuations of the images.” (PH)

The clean 16mm image is processed normally in a lab, but the tinting and toning was done via 'green' processing with flowers. The shooting and hand developing with flowers was done by Philip Hoffman. It was scanned and then digitally edited by Isiah Medina.

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.

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’.

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?"

Trees, farm fields with animal livestock, ponds and plants, and natural artefacts disappear in the flicker effect of landscape compositions where sweeping branches carve moving structures into the viewer’s memory, and the transformations of living image threads remind us of the inexhaustible visual exuberance of meadows and grain.

"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)

1988 short film by 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.

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

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).

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.

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.

A film by Philip Hoffman that chronicles the final days of his father.