Philip Hoffman

Filmed over 2 years (2020–2022), at home and away, Deep 1 is a diaristic meditation, flower/plant processed.

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.

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 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 Outdated film stock from the 1980s-90s which Peter Mettler recently gave Philip Hoffman accounts for superimpositions.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.

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).

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.

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?"

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’.

Kokoro Is for Heart features poet Gerry Shikatani and explores the relationships surrounding language, image and sound, set to the backdrop of a gravel pit. When I got the footage back from the lab I was disappointed because of the periodic flipping of the image. After screening the footage several times I realised that the malfunctioning camera rendered the filmed-nature unnatural ...and this poses questions: what is nature? What is natural? Ph

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.

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.

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.

1988 short film by Philip Hoffman.

1988 short film by Philip Hoffman.

1988 short film by Philip Hoffman.

1988 short film by Philip Hoffman.

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

"In cinema one extracts the thought from the image; in literature the image from the thought" (Levinson). This reflection was the catalyst for the photographic and narrative strategies of "On Land Over Water." "On Land Over Water..." was born out of an image-notion of a skid mark on a highway, photographed in close-up, revealing texture and form. The image would be positioned with a voice-over narration, telling the story of a young boy witnessing a fatal auto accident and its ensuing aftermath. Over the following winter months I meditated on the cinematic potentials of that notion, "On Land Over Water..." is the product of working out variations of that meditation. In story discourse, "On Land..."experiments with the possibilities of adopting the characteristics of the short story to the forms of cinema. (RK)

“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)

Film images, stills and sound collected over six years coalesce in The Road Ended at the Beach. Hoffman interrogates both the journey, involving famed American photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank, and the process of its documentation as/in film.