"The subject, the filmmaker/diarist, whose consciousness encompasses this flow or passage of time, uses failure to make his strongest points about the convergence and intermingling of anticipation and event, experience and memory. Setting out to capture experiences of previous trips, he instead meets disappointment and frustration with events and people who do not fulfil his expectations. Spurred on by the mythology of Jack Kerouac and his life on the road, the travellers visit #Beat# photographer/filmmaker Robert Frank who matter-of-factly dismisses their quest by noting that Kerouac is dead and the Beat era is over. In a partial response to the shattering of the myth, the filmmaker goes back over the ground of the journey once again, only this time he includes the frustrations, dead-ends and low spots. The final sequence of the film marks a re-evaluation. On the beach where the road ends discontinuity becomes a virtue, a form of concentration that validates exceptional experience, just as recollection and anticipation validate certain memories and fantasies." (David Poole)

"In making this film I collected images and sounds over six years of travel (not continuous) through Canada. Keeping daily both filmic and written records, I focused on people and places, my relationships to them, and the changes that occurred between each visit. I would collect these images freely: later to examine and make meaning of during the editing process. In this film I started to consciously pursue the relationship between a formal chronicle of events and my memory of those events." (PH)

"The Road Ended at the Beach is a collage of film footage, sound tapes and photographs recorded by Hoffman on four journeys over a seven year period. The documents represent a naïve impulse to record 'significant' events: a picturesque sunset, a visit with Robert Frank, an accident on the highway. The act of linking together records of past journeys becomes for Hoffman a new odyssey in itself, a journey toward self-discovery built upon documents of the past." (Shelley Stamp, "Systems in Collapse," A Newsletter Called Fred, March/April 1985)

Production format: 16mm