Philip Hoffman's passing through/torn formations by Mike Hoolboom
The most
important Canadian film made in 1987 will
not be playing in a theatre near you, neither subject to those
journalists charged with turning images into verse or to an audience whose
unflagging allegiance to American stars
has so recently nurtured Mulroney's latest sell-out of Canadian theatres.
Instead this brilliant meditation on violence must be relegated to the
backwaters of Canadian expression, unwilling to con form—to change the how of
its expression to suit Telefilm's turning of Canadian
light into American money.
A turn of a
different sort has been negotiated by a group of filmmakers belonging to the
Hoffman's
sixth film in ten years, passing
through/torn formations is a generational saga laid over three picture
rolls that rejoins in its symphonic montage the broken remnants of a family
separated by war, disease, madness and migration. Begun in darkness with an
extract from Christopher Dewdney's Predators
of the Adoration, the poet narrates the story of 'you,' a child who
explores an abandoned limestone quarry. Oblivious to the children who surround,
it is the dead that fascinate, pressed together to form limestones
that part slowly between prying fingers before lifting into a horizon of lost referentiality. The following scene moves silently from a
window drape to enfeebled grandmother to her daughter, patiently feeding her
blood in a quiet reversal of her own infancy. Over and over the camera searches
out the flowered drape, speaking both of a vegetable life cycle of death and
rebirth and the literal meaning of the word 'apocalypse' which means the
tearing of the veil or drape. The film's theme of reconciliation begins with
death's media/tion—and moves its broken signifiers
together in the film's central image, 'the corner mirror,' two mirrored
rectangles stacked at right angles. This looking glass offers a 'true
reflection,' not the reversed image of the usual mirror but the objectified
stare of the Other. When Rimbaud announces 'I am
another' he does so in a gesture that unites traveller
and teller, confirming his status within the story
while continuing to tell it. It is the absence of this distance, this doubling
that leads the Czech side of the family to fatality.
Each figure
in the film has a European double, as if the entry into the New World carried
with it not only the inevitable burdens of translation (from the Latin 'translatio' to bear across) but also the burden of all that
could not be said or carried, to all that needed to be left behind. There are
two grandmothers in the film—Babji, dying in a
Canadian old age home and Hanna whose Czech tales are translated by the
filmmaker's mother. There are likewise two grandfathers, Driououx
married to the dying Babji in
The darkroom, a ceremony of mixing
potions, gathering up the shimmering images, the silvery magic beneath dream's
surface. In the morning Babji
would tell us what our dreams meant, and then stories of the 'old country'
would surface, stories I can't remember... now that she's quiet, we can't hear
about where it all came from, so it's my turn to go back, knowing at the start
the failure of this indulgence, but only to play out these experiments already
in motion. passing through/torn formations
This
connection between things made in the dark: doesn't this aspiration lie at the
heart of every motion picture? We can say this for certain: that this darkness
has occupied the centre of Hoffman's film work since Somewhere Between Jalostotitlian
and Encarnacion (1984). While Somewhere Between moves around his real
life encounter with a boy lying dead on the Mexican roadside the boy is nowhere
to be seen; Hoffman relates his death in a series of printed intertitles that punctuate the film. Similarly, midway through ?O,Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film) (1986)
an elephant's heart attack is related in voice-over while the screen remains
dark and the voice explains, somewhat abashed, that showing its death would
only exploit his subject. The centre of passing
through is likewise 'missing'—while the film performs a series of balletic turns around the filmmaker's uncle, showing as
many as three images simultaneously in a counterpoint usually reserved for
music—he is usually present only in Hoffman's narration. Unnamed and barely
photographed, we learn nevertheless of the uncle's homeless vagrancy, his
affinity for pool and the accordion, his building of the corner mirror and his
abandoned daughter. Hoffman searches out the reasons for his homeless wandering
in the home he never had, in the place of his conception, in a Czechslovakia ravaged by plague and occupation. That he
should bear the stamp of this history, this sickness, without a glimpse of the
death camps that would claim his ancestors or the soil that had nourished
thousands of his forbears recalls for us the movement of this film around a
figure that is hardly seen. The filmmaker moves in his place—drawing his camera
over the places 'he' could never go, looking for reasons 'he' could never guess
in his restless quest for dry dock and food, for his perfect game and the
delirium of the accordion.
He stares out. Fingers pound the
keyboard. Magically. Melodies repeat. Again and again. Fingers dissolve into fingers. He was past
the point of practice. The music was a vacant place to return to. Over and over. His playing gave him passage. passing
through/torn formations
Originally
published in: Cinema