"The films of Philip Hoffman have revived the travelogue, long the preserve of tourist officials anxious to convert geography into currency. Hoffman's passages are too deeply felt, too troubled in their self-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 - set between the filmmaker's familial home and his new found residency at college - to a trek across Canada (The Road Ended at the Beach); from Holland, where he was invited to the set of Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts and made ?O, ZOO! (THE MAKING OF A FICTION FILM) to Mexico for his haiku-inspired short SOMEWHERE BETWEEN JALOSTOTITLAN AND ENCARNACION; from PASSING THROUGH/TORN formations pan-continental dialogue of madness and memory to KITCHENER-BERLIN'S oceanic traversal; and finally, to River, a landscape meditation that leads inevitably home.
"Denoting the family as a source and stage of inspiration, Hoffman's gracious archeology is haunted by death, the absent centre in much of his practice, a meditation on morality and its representation. His restlessness navigations are invariably followed by months of torturous editing as history is strained through its own image, recalling Derrida's dictum that everything begins with reproduction. Hoffman's delicately enacted shapings of his own past is a once poetry, pastiche, and proclamation, a resounding affirmation of all that is well with independent film today." - Mike Hoolboom, "Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film in Canada"
Marian McMahon, an inspired writer, filmmaker and curator, and an activist of "the social" and "the everyday," passed away in 1996. She was a lifelong working and living companion with filmmaker Philip Hoffman, who is currently bringing to completion Marian's Doctorate thesis and her final film Racing Home.
SOMEWHERE BETWEEN JALOSTOTITLAN AND ENCARNACION is a handheld travelogue of North America, presented in the unbroken 28-second shots of [Hoffman's] spring-wind camera and the intertitles of a Mexican journey. SOMEWHERE BETWEEN ... is a Catholic drama of life and death played out in the streets of North America. Its gesture is a public circumstance: a horn band in Guadalajara, a Catholic procession in Toronto, distant passing traffic in Colorado. These scenes are presented, each in their turn, as separate and discrete events moving between titles describing a boy lying dead. They are a discourse that moves a geography of surface into concert with a transcendental history, a history of death." - Michael Hoolboom, Vanguard
1984, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 6m, $25
"Philip Hoffman's ?O,ZOO! (THE MAKING OF A FICTION FILM) uses a diary format to skirt along the edge of someone else's filmed narrative (Peter Greenaway's A Zed & Two Noughts), and to trace the anatomy of pure image-making. 'Pure' is both the right and the wrong word: Hoffman is a man addicted to the hermetic thisness of filmed images, and plagued by the suspicion that these images, far from being pure, are really scabs torn away from the sores of the world. Found footage shot by his grandfather (a newsreel cameraman) is the starting point for Hoffman's meditations on the illusion of visual purity, and on the distance between the 'neutral' image and the value-laden narrative that it can be made to serve. It is a moral distance, one that this filmmaker surveys with a wary fascination." - Robert Everett-Green
"... Hoffman rewrites the Canadian documentary tradition into a family memory and romance." - Blaine Allan
1986, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 23m, $70
"Philip Hoffman's PASSING THROUGH/TORN FORMATIONS is a wide open ramble through the labyrinth of memory, considered primarily as a family affair. The film deals with the life and history of Hoffman's Czech-born mother and her family, presented as a kind of polyphonic recitation - of words, of images and of sounds." - Robert Everett-Green
"PASSING THROUGH/TORN FORMATIONS extends from Eastern Europe and back again - an unravelling tapestry of family relations that speaks of migration and translation." - Marian McMahon
"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." - Stan Brakhage
1988, 16mm, b&w/color/so, 43m, $135
"Hoffman juxtaposes his home town, the Canadian city of Kitchener (formerly called Berlin), with its European namesake of the World War II era. 'The hyphen in the title suggests both severance from the past and connection to it.' 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. The film's opening segment, 'A Measured Dance,' is fluid and seductive, with deliberate and rhythmic camera movement and complex editing. Its second part, 'Veiled Flight' (introduced with an astounding 'Prologue' drawn from archival sources), is more enigmatic, turning inward with the visual metaphor of underground exploration, and suggests the extent to which film-makers are engaged in the work of making ghosts of the past for the future." - Blaine Allen
1990, 16mm, color/so, 34m, $100
Directors: Marion McMahon and Phil Hoffman
"NURSING HISTORY began as an inquiry into the nature of woman's work, specifically the relationship between woman's work as wives and mothers, and woman's work as nurses. Having worked as a nurse for ten years, I decided to locate this inquiry historically, within my own past as represented in the home movies that, for the most part, my father had made and that stand as a record of our family's history. From 1968-1984, 60 minutes worth of history , on Super-8 film, were recorded. Out of this footage there were forty minutes of weddings and in each case it was the bridge that was related to our family. In reviewing this public record of interpreted events, I found myself living within memories of events that could not be seen. While watching these familiar faces represented in this official history, I recalled other versions of the events recorded, as well as other events that didn't get recorded but had occurred at the same time. I began to ask what else was being recorded here and whose histories were these images claiming to represent?" - Marion McMahon, Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre Catalogue
1989, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $35
The film consists of collected, diaristic images amassed through Hoffman's travels. Uluru and an incomplete parliament house, for example, making floating appearances. These have been gathered on the run, and then reconstituted with an uncanny ephemeral floating rhythm, a dance of light, and replaying, with commendable control, the idea of visual music, visual jazz. Though the method of collection may have had an air of arbitrariness about it, the meticulous construction and focus on rhythm in the finished piece suggest an artist who has learnt to master technique so as to let it speak for him about 'other' things." - Dirk de Bruyn
Award: Award for Experimental Film, Athens Film Festival, 1997
Exhibition: Melbourne Film Festival, 1996; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Sydney Film Festival; Helsinki Film Festival; Pleasure Dome, Toronto; Millennium, NY.
1995, 16mm, color/so, 15m, $45
Music by Tucker Zimmerman
'What these ashes wanted' (2001) places flesh on the poet Ann Carson's words "...death lines every moment of ordinary time." With this work Hoffman resides in an acutely intimate time, a daily practise of loss lived precariously between the terror of psychic disintegration and the provisional solace taken through public rituals of mourning.
'What these ashes wanted' is not a story of surviving death, but rather, of living death through a heightening of the quotidian moments of every day experience. (Catalogue for Images Festival, Toronto 2001)
...Hoffman arranges the jagged bits of life he shared with writer Marian McMahon. Her early death in 1996 provoked this essay on mortality. Hoffman's goal: "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."
Using painterly swatches of sunflowers, handprocessed film, found sound recordings, the "antiseptic fictions" of doctors and other mortal icons, Hoffman takes us on journeys to London, Helsinki and Egypt. Pondering morbidity in its many forms, Hoffman discloses an early photographic assignment involving his deceased grand-father, a failed suicide, and his own personal numerology of death centering on the number 17. Through these and other memories, he develops a soul-searching vocabulary of love for one whose journey continues into the beyond.
"If you had to make up your own ritual for death, what would it be? Would it be private or shared? asked his partner, Marian. Hoffman's answer is this beautiful document." - San Francisco International Film Festival Program Guide 2002.
Golden Gate Award, New Visions, San Francisco International Film Festival 2002; Gus Van Sant Award, Ann Arbor Film Festival 2002; Telefilm Canada Award, Images Film Festival, Toronto 2001.
2001, 16mm, color/so, 55m, $145