Philip Hoffman Publications

Articles on specific films can be found in Filmography.

Landscape With Shipwreck
first person cinema and the films of philip hoffman

(edited by karyn sandlos and mike hoolboom)

Philip Hoffman has been making personal documentary films for over twenty years. He has devoted his life to examining the narrow aperture each of us uses to bring our own experience into focus. As many of the writers in this volume will attest, telling personal stories is dangerous work.

Landscape with Shipwreck is an untidy stew of gravediggers and critics, architects and builders. In their conversion of pictures into words, each has used the history of their own naming as compass and guide. These photographs and scripts speak alongside the written word, not to fill in the gaps but to deepen them, not to make the strange seem more familiar, but to turn towards the secret task of this volume: to write what cannot be written. To write what must never be written. To uncover a kind of writing that is beside itself, and without regret.

"Philip Hoffman's work is an encouragement to those who want to use autobiography as subject matter, personal vision as a trademark, and show how small resources can be a positive virtue."

Peter Greenaway

"Philip Hoffman is a precious resource, one of the few contemporary filmmakers whose work provides a bridge to the classical themes of death, diaspora, memory, and, finally, transcendence. As Landscape With Shipwreck makes clear, Hoffman explores these most Canadian of themes without grandiosity; instead they emerge from stories held close to the ground, the family, and personal experience, whether at home or in very unfamiliar places indeed. And he does so through a constant renovation of method that enriches the viewers' ability to grasp how film form contains and conditions meaning. This is just the sort of human voice articulated through film that we desperately need amidst the thunder of corporate media in all forms."

Martha Rosler, Artist and Professor of Media
and Critical Studies at Rutgers University

"Philip Hoffman's films are a revelation for those lucky enough to see them. At once literary document and visual archive, Landscapes With Shipwreck advances contemporary thinking about Hoffman's films and the autobiographical documentary tradition in Canadian cinema."

Piers Handling, Director, Toronto International Film Festival

PURCHASE LANDSCAPE WITH SHIPWRECK ONLINE

DOWNLOAD LANDSCAPE WITH SHIPWRECK ONLINE
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 (PDF Format)

Rivers of Time
The Films of Philip Hoffman

(Edited by Tom McSorley)

Published by the Canadian Film Institute, 2008.
All rights reserved.

The lake is calm, like a great sheet of ice.

In the middle, between the beach and the far shore,
has surfaced a large finely textured brick,
its sharp edges shaped by the rising sun.

Beneath the scene, a voice:

I like wrecked bricks, the points pierce my eyes, sending me hurling in space.

I revisited this curious post-adolescent site in 1989 after the completion of an initial cycle of excavations. Formal experiments on super-8 using the single-frame-zoom, which splayed the surround of the filmed subjects, squeezing out their ghosts. After seven years of collect, reflect, revise this form found its place in the film `Chimera’, and the power of its pull lead me into dark gardens of loss. In Mark Doty’s words:

What these ashes wanted, I felt sure,
Was not containment but participation.
Not an enclosure of memory,
But the world.’

These films are a circle of stones. Embedded in each is the world, reaching deeply into the past, rolling on..

Philip Hoffman, Circling Stones, Spring 2008

	Contents
	Phil MIKE HOOLBOOM
	On Philip Hoffman ANDRE LOISELLE
	Thawing Phil Hoffman’s Freeze-up (1979) RICK HANCOX
	Tales of Hoffman (Expected Time of Arrival) SCOTT BIRDWISE
	I know you are, so what am I?: 25 passing through/torn formations CHRIS ROBINSON
	Kitchener-Berlin as Aesthetic Allegory JAMES MISSEN
	Kitchener-Berlin PENNY MCCANN
	Time Sweeping Space TOM MCSORLEY
	Experiments in Disorientation: Chimera CHRISTOPHER ROHDE
	Travelling Companions TOM MCSORLEY
	Interview
	Philip Hoffman Filmmography 1978-2008
	Contributors

DOWNLOAD RIVERS OF TIME ONLINE
Rivers of Time, (PDF Format)

Writings About Philip Hoffman

Study Guide: Philip Hoffman - POETRY AND PROCESS: THREE FILMS BY PHILIP HOFFMAN (Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre Spotlight Series)

Book Review Landscape with Shipwreck: First Person Cinema and the Films of Philip Hoffman by Elizabeth Johnston, edited by Karyn Sandlos and Mike Hoolboom

The Spy Who Knew Too Much by Richard Kerr

The Landscape Journal by Ronald Heydon

In/Between Spaces by Darrell Varga

Philip Hoffman: biographical notes by Peter Harcourt

Circuitous Quests: Passing Through Philip Hoffman's Family Cycle by Peter Harcourt

Celluloid Diary, by Grecia A. Sarigianni, Salsomaggiore, 1986

Phil Hoffman Interview by June Hodgson and Mike White
Media News, Sheridan College, 1988

Passing Through: The film cycle of Philip Hoffman by Mike Hoolboom

Philip Hoffman’s Films by Gary Popovich

Impure Cinemas: Hoffman in Context, by Chris Gehman
Landscape with Shipwreck: First Person Cinema and the Films of Philip Hoffman ed. Hoolboom and Sandlos Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2001

Canadian Independent Filmmaker Comes to Perth For Solo Screening! Perth Exhibition

Interaction Through Navel Gazing: Philip Hoffman and First Person Cinema by Miia Jonka

Film Farm Publications

The Film Farm, BizBull Sept., 2004

The Independent Imaging Retreat by Chris Gehman, 2003

Farming the Inconscious: A Film Farm Journal, by Maureen Bradley, June, 2002

Films and Fairy Dust by Cara Morton, Liaison of Independent Filmmakers (LIFT) Newsletter. Summer 1996.

Women, Nature and Chemistry: Hand-Processed Films from The Independent Imaging Workshop by Janine Marchessault

Writings by Philip Hoffman

Helsinki Trip AVEK Magazine for Audio-Visual Culture, Finland, Feb. 16. 2004

Images Talk, April 2001

Fish In The Sky: Beginnings of a filmmaking retreat, 1997

Carte Blanche, Guide of the Ontario Cinematheque, Fall 1992

A Play of History, A Play of History Catalogue, Toronto: Power Plant, February 1987

Interviews

Hand-Made (in the digital age), an interview with Phil Hoffman by Aysegul Koc March 2002

An interview with Philip Hoffman, Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film in Canada by Mike Hoolboom
First Edition: Gutter Press, 1997. Revised and Expanded Second Edition: Coach House, 2001

Duets: Hoffman in the 90s: an interview by Mike Hoolboom

Phil Hoffman Interview by Jane Hodgson and Mike White 1991

Philip Hoffman Interview by Hunter Cordaiy for Metro Media & Education Magazine, July 18, 1991, first version

Interview with Philip Hoffman by Mario Falsetto, 1989

Philip Hoffman Radio Banff Interview by XX – Autumn 1989

Interview with Philip Hoffman by Lee Hill

Links

San Francisco Cinematheque (2004)
"Passing Through: A Philip Hoffman Retrospective"
http://www.yorku.ca/finearts/news/0404.htm

Canadian Film Institute (2002)
Landscape With Shipwreck
http://www.cfi-icf.ca/ma02_ph.html

passing through/torn formations and the Performative Documentary (2004) by Robert Craig
http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/phil_hoffman.html