Now Available: Four Films by Philip Hoffman
Posted August 14th, 2024 in Announcements, New Acquisitions, New Digital Files, News / Events
Canyon Cinema is pleased to announce the acquisition of four recent handmade films by longtime artist member Philip Hoffman.
A film artist of memory and association, Hoffman has long been recognized as Canada’s pre-eminent diary filmmaker. As Karyn Sandlos writes, “For over twenty years he has been straining history through personal fictions, using the material of his life to deconstruct the Griersonian legacy of documentary practice. As an artist working directly upon the material of film, Hoffman is keenly attuned to the shape of seeing, foregrounding the image and its creation as well as the manufacture of point of view. Hoffman’s films are deeply troubled in their remembrances; he dusts off the family archive to examine how estrangement fuels a fascination with the familiar surroundings of home.” In 2016, he received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.
Hoffman’s new films use several processing methods, including flower/plant hand-processing and decay. vulture and Deep 1 follow winged and four legged animals, both wild and domestic, as they traverse the frame marked by a hand-made practice. Minute inter-species exchanges surface throughout the films. vulture received the Kodak Cinematic Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in 2019, the Fugas International Jury Prize for Best Film Award at Documenta Madrid in 2020, and the Environmental Certificate for Eco-Sensitivity, at Docpoint in Helsinki in 2020. Deep 1 received a Jury Award at Ann Arbor Film Festival in 2023.
Since 1994, Hoffman has been the artistic director of the Independent Imaging Retreat (Film Farm), a 1-week workshop in artisanal filmmaking in Mount Forest, Ontario. In 2019, Film Farm celebrated its 25th anniversary with screenings and a gallery installation at TIFF Bell Lightbox, in Toronto. In 2024, the workshop is celebrating its 30th Anniversary with screenings at CamLab in Boston, at the S8 Festival in A Coruña, Spain and Other Cinema in San Francisco.
Stay tuned for information about a Canyon Cinema Salon with Philip Hoffman this September.
vulture (2019, 57 minutes, color/b&w, sound, digital file)
vulture sets its sight on farm animals and their surrounding flora. 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 film was shot and processed with various means including flower/plant processing carried out as blooming occurred, from 2016–18. In some cases a salt bath was used for fixing the film, which was left soaking in the dark for 3 days.
Deep 1 (2023, 15 minutes, color/b&w, sound, digital file)
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 from 2020–2022, processed and decayed with hyacinth and lichen extract, the film is built on a sustainable practice: images and the imaging making process evolve out of “a complex material engagement with an eco-system that draws out the expressive possibilities of living things beyond conventional forms of representation.” (Kim Knowles)
endings (2023, 9.5 minutes, color/b&w, sound, digital file)
Co-Director: Isiah Medina
Trees 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.
Flowers #3 (Kissed by the Sun) (2024, 10 minutes, color, silent, digital file)
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). 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. (PH)
