This program is presented in collaboration with WNDX. WNDX festival passes are accepted for admission.
Death, life, love, memory and loss together comprise the essential stuff that forms the oeuvre of Canadian experimental filmmaker Philip Hoffman. Indeed, in an interview with Barbara Sternberg, Hoffman acknowledges that “not all filmmakers deal with death so directly, or so often” as he has within his body of work. And yet, this is just the start, because there is no single way to merely ‘watch’ a Hoffman film; when you enter the darkened space of the cinema, you become a participant within Hoffman’s memories and you come to know Hoffman as a person perhaps better than you know yourself.
Hoffman hands down film in a very personal and transformative way, without much fanfare, but in a way that indelibly impacts the receiver. If documentary is “the telling of a story or illumination of themes, as poetry is a story or theme told by images,” as defined by John Grierson – long recognized as the ‘father’ of documentary in Canada through his influence in the establishment the NFB – and poetry “uses many effects of sound, imagery and vocabulary to achieve a heightened, intensive form of expression,” as the Gage Canadian Dictionary posits, then Hoffman is indeed a master documentarian through his poetic diary cinema experimentations, even as he actively seeks to purge “the ghost of Grierson” with his work at the same time, replacing the traditionally strong educational leaning of the documentary form with something that is far more personal. – Cecilia Araneda
WED OCT 7 @ 7 PM: RETROSPECTIVE I
Kitchener-Berlin (1990, 34 mins, 16 mm)
Kitchener-Berlin is a naming of recall, a movement into the city’s Germanic traditions, and its rituals of memory, bereavement, and technology. It is Hoffman’s most frankly “poetic” film, employing image phrases across a wordless field of interlocking fragments, gathering the sum of a diary travel in overlapping movements that quietly course through a rectangle of introspection. – Mike Hoolboom
passing through / torn formations (1988, 43 mins, 16 mm)
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 thought process, tracks visual theme as the mind tracks shape, makes melody of noise and words as the mind recalls sound. – Stan Brakhage
WED OCT 7 @ 9 PM: RETROSPECTIVE II
?O, Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film) (1986, 23 mins, 16 mm)
In ?O, Zoo! Hoffman grapples with the Griersonian legacy of Canadian documentary cinema. Largely shot around the production of Peter Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Noughts, the film constructs a labyrinthean fiction out of “documentary” materials, and places the story of a death at its unseen centre. – Images Festival
What these ashes wanted (2001, 55 mins, 16 mm)
‘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
* Golden Gate Award, New Visions, San Francisco International Film Festival 2002
* Gus Van Sant Award, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2002
* Telefilm Canada Award, Images Festival, 2001
