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PHILIP HOFFMAN
Canadian Independent Filmmaker Comes
to
The films of
Philip Hoffman cannot be situated within any specific genre of film making, instead we see a remarkable shift between styles
that incorporate the home movie, the idiosyncratic documentary, and the
formalist exploration of the permutations of sound and image. Hoffman's cinema
is an intensely subjective one, often employing an emotional voice-over to colour the residual traces of the lost and found seen in
faded family snapshots, grainy archival 16mm and standard 8 memories. Other
works share a lyrical thread
in the mode of Stan Brakhage with their graphic and
rhythmic effects that engage a viewers perception in a
complex dialectical relationship between the techniques of cinema and
the physiology and psychology of vision. The poetic intention running through
many of Hoffman's images, from the shadowy
black and white portrait of a dying grandmother in passing through / torn formations to the ephemeral floating rhythm
of a fragmented cityscape in Chimera can be understood in part as a desire to reconstitute impressions of memory - (the
filmmaker enters) "the work of making ghosts of the past for the
future." (Sam Landels)
Denoting the
family as source and stage of inspiration, Hoffman's gracious archaeology is haunted by death, the absent centre
in much of his diary practice a meditation on mortality and its representation.
His restless navigation's are invariably followed by months of tortuous editing as history is strained through its own
image, recalling Derrida's dictum that everything begins with
reproduction. Hoffman's delicately enacted shaping of his own past is at once poetry, pastiche, and proclamation, a
resounding affirmation of all that is well with independent cinema
today. (Mike Hoolboom, Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film In Canada, 1997).
Program:
river
Special Matinee
Screening attended by film maker Phillip Hoffman on Sunday May 31st
1998, 5.30 pm at the Film and
Television Institute,
Tickets
$7
full or $5 conc/members. Please note change of date!
For all enquiries please contact Sam Landels
on 9328 2808 or the FTI on 9335 1055.
This event is
proudly sponsored by Imago Multimedia Centre and The
Film and
Television Institute.