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PHILIP HOFFMAN IN PERSON!Kicking off a whirlwind weekend of Bay Area events, Canyon Cinema is pleased to welcome Canadian film experimentalist and longtime artist member Philip Hoffman to 16 Sherman for a screening of his 2019 feature, vulture. The film follows winged and four-legged animals, both wild and domestic, as they traverse the frame marked by a hand-made practice. Like all of Hoffman’s recent work, vulture makes use of several processing methods, including flower/plant hand-processing and decay. Minute inter-species exchanges surface throughout the film, which received the Kodak Cinematic Award at the 2019 Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Fugas International Jury Prize for Best Film Award at Documenta Madrid in 2020, and the Environmental Certificate for Eco-Sensitivity, at Docpoint in Helsinki in 2020.
vulture is preceded by two films made at the Independent Imaging Retreat (Film Farm), which takes place annually on Hoffman’s farm in rural Ontario: Sans Titre by former Canyon Cinema Director Maïa Cybelle Carpenter and Into the Wild by Austrian filmmaker Markus Maicher.
A 30th Anniversary Film Farm screening will take place the following night, on Saturday, September 21st at Artists’ Television Access, presented by Other Cinema. In addition, on Sunday, September 22nd, Oakland’s Shapeshifters Cinema will host an afternoon filmmaking workshop with Hoffman – Botanical Conversations: Making Images With Plants – followed by a screening of Hoffman’s short films later that evening.
As always, this Canyon Cinema Salon event is free and open to the public, with refreshments served beginning at 7pm and the doors closed for the start of the show at 7:30. Please note that well-fitting masks (N95 or KN95) are strongly encouraged, and that the theater’s seating capacity is extremely limited. An informal conversation with the filmmaker will follow the screening.
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SCREENING LINE-UP:
Sans Titre (Maïa Cybelle Carpenter, 2019, 8 minutes, 16mm)
Optically printed, hand processed and painted, this film records the space of light. It attempts to remove the Form of abstraction from Matter and thus places the viewer in a virtual temporo-space. The last minute of film is comprised of clear leader. After this, the projector remains running with no film passing through its gate for 30-60 seconds. This flickering white light completes the film’s projection.
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Into the Wild (Markus Maicher, 2020, 4 minutes, digital file)
Images, harvested on a farm in Mount Forest, Canada, captured with a hand-cranked Bolex on 16mm sound stock. Hand-processed in buckets, in shimmering red light down by the old stables. A glimpse through the cracks, somebody is walking in the meadow, trees and flowers trembling in the wind. A world that only film can see, a material flow emerging from the coupling of camera, celluloid, silver salts, chemicals, light particles and the hand of the filmmaker. The film was entirely processed by hand and chemically treated: overexposed images were brought back to life with bleach, other images were solarized and reversed.
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vulture (Philip Hoffman, 2019, 57 minutes, digital file)
vulture sets its sight on farm animals and their surrounding flora. 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 film was shot and processed with various means including flower/plant processing carried out as blooming occurred, from 2016–18. In some cases a salt bath was used for fixing the film which was left soaking in the dark for 3 days.
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Approximate running time: 70 minutes
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ABOUT PHILIP HOFFMAN
A film artist of memory and association, Philip Hoffman has long been recognized as Canada’s pre-eminent diary filmmaker. He apprenticed in Europe with Peter Greenaway in 1985, where he made ?O,Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film) (1985), which was nominated for a Canadian Genie Award. On passing through/torn formations (1988), Stan Brakhage recognized how “Hoffman’s editing throughout is true to thought process, tracks visual theme as the mind tracks shape, makes melody of noise and words as the mind recalls sound.” Hoffman has been honored with more than 25 retrospectives of his work. Among them was the centrepiece series at the 2001 Images Festival in Toronto, coupled with the launch of a book titled Landscape with Shipwreck: First Person Cinema and the Films of Philip Hoffman, comprising some 25 essays by academics and artists. In 2002, he received the Golden Gate Award from the San Francisco International Film Festival and the Gus Van Sant Award from the Ann Arbor Film Festival for What These Ashes Wanted, a diaristic meditation on loss and grief. In 2009, he premiered his feature-length experimental documentary, All Fall Down, at the Berlin International Film Festival. The film is a reflection on childhood, property, ecology, and love. Hoffman completed three works in 2014: Slaughterhouse (based on his installation for LandSlide, at the Markham Museum) and Aged, which won awards at the Black Maria Festival in New Jersey and Onion City Film Festival in Chicago, respectively. In 2016, Docpoint Documentary Film Festival in Helsinki mounted an “Introspective,” gathering together five programs of Hoffman’s works, along with works of students and artists he was involved with during the 1990’s in Finland. In 2016, Hoffman received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.
Since 1994, Hoffman has been the artistic director of the Independent Imaging Retreat (Film Farm), a 1-week workshop in artisanal filmmaking in Mount Forest, Ontario. In 2019 Film Farm celebrated its 25th anniversary with screenings and a gallery installation at TIFF Bell Lightbox, in Toronto. In 2024 the workshop is celebrating its 30th Anniversary with screenings at CamLab in Boston, the S8 Festival in A Coruña, Spain, and Other Cinema in San Francisco.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
16 Sherman St, San Francisco, CA 94103-4021, United States
