·The film consists of collected, diaristic images amassed through Hoffman·s travels. Uluru... Russian shoppers, a Cairo market, and day to day images from home and away... make 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, Melbourne Film Festival Catalogue 1996). 
 
·In 1989 I finished the film Kitchener-Berlin and put a close to a cycle of work which dealt directly with myself, and how self is expressed/constructed cinematically. At the same time I took my old super-8 camera out of the closet, and began collecting images, using the single-frame-zoom. Cubist in its visual delivery, the single-frame-zoom builds a splayed reality that brings together disparate vantage points simultaneously, and serves as the glue that blends and bonds peoples, places and spaces in Chimera.· (Philip Hoffman)
 

 
 
REVIEWS & ARTICLES
 
Chimera - Philip Hoffman (Canada, 1996, 16mm, 15:00 min): "Chimera is Hoffman’s most understated film that explores his two most common themes: death and chaos. And it is perhaps his most immediate film dealing with frozen moments, life transitions and fragments of memory." - Impakt, The Netherlands