Kokoro Is for Heart

A film by Philip Hoffman that chronicles the final days of his father.

1988 short film by Philip Hoffman.

A kinetic journey through Expo 67, revisiting Canada’s centennial through the symbols, choreographies, and built environments of the World’s Fair and its construction of (inter)nationalism. Reworking archival footage, By the Time We Got to Expo creates a vibrant collision of textures and forms in order to explore the surfaces, ideologies, and implications of the ‘meeting place’ that was Expo 67.

The speculative tale of Canadian outsider musician Lewis and the belated discovery of his 1983 album "L'Amour". A love story composed in myth and song.

Trees, farm fields with animal livestock, ponds and plants, and natural artefacts disappear in the flicker effect of landscape compositions where sweeping branches carve moving structures into the viewer’s memory, and the transformations of living image threads remind us of the inexhaustible visual exuberance of meadows and grain.

In attempting to deal with his HIV status, the narrator mixes his past and present to give us a portrait of friendships, family ties, and other intimate relationships.

Processed with conventional photo chemicals and the following flowers: magnolia blossoms, hyacinth, hydrangea, daffodil, rhododendron, pond algae, lilac, oregano (with blooms), comfrey (with blooms), roses, mint, goldenrod, hostas buds after flowering, and wild garlic seeds (a bowlful).

vulture sets its sights on farm animals, their surrounding flora, and the farming process. 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 clean 16mm image is processed normally in a lab, but the tinting and toning was done via 'green' processing with flowers. The shooting and hand developing with flowers was done by Philip Hoffman. It was scanned and then digitally edited by Isiah Medina.

"In cinema one extracts the thought from the image; in literature the image from the thought" (Levinson). This reflection was the catalyst for the photographic and narrative strategies of "On Land Over Water." "On Land Over Water..." was born out of an image-notion of a skid mark on a highway, photographed in close-up, revealing texture and form. The image would be positioned with a voice-over narration, telling the story of a young boy witnessing a fatal auto accident and its ensuing aftermath. Over the following winter months I meditated on the cinematic potentials of that notion, "On Land Over Water..." is the product of working out variations of that meditation. In story discourse, "On Land..."experiments with the possibilities of adopting the characteristics of the short story to the forms of cinema. (RK)

Sweep is a road movie to memory, a realization of the need to review footsteps and past events which build myths. The camera gazes at the spaces in-between image and text, photography and memory, body and place. The surface texture of the film, like the land north of Lake Superior, is overdetermined by the discourse of territorialism, the cultural divisions of space and place framed and divided amid the ruins of history. An irritating buzz overlays parts of the soundtrack, signifying the hydro-electric development that has irreparably disrupted life in the north, while at the same time extending a modicum of material benefits. The filmmakers understand themselves as embodying this southern technocracy, and choose to turn the camera onto their own presence and progress of looking. Here, they work against the tendency, present since the days of Flaherty and in his more recent imitators, to objectify Aboriginal peoples within an unnameable (and thus exploitable) landscape.

“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.” (PH)

Filmed over 2 years (2020–2022), at home and away, Deep 1 is a diaristic meditation, flower/plant processed.

"Slaughterhouse has all the ingredients of history but its collage form forces a reading less linear, and more conducive to seeing history anew.." -P. Hoffman

"A community workshop held by the Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film in Durham, Ontario, engages participants in a group phytogram creation collaboration. The resulting work suggests a long flow of what the phytogram 'founder,' Karel Doing, posits as a kind of vegetal 'being,' a springtime world beyond what we can know or judge." - Philip Hoffman

“The bus stopped on the Mexican highway, placing us in full view of a young boy, motionless, on the hot pavement. In this film, the incident is revealed through a poetic text, derived from my written journals. The poetry mixes primarily with Mexican streetscapes which compliment the text in a tonal sense. Most images are twenty-eight seconds long, the ‘breath’ of the 16mm Bolex camera. A lone saxophone (Mike Callich) weaves its way through the narrative, blending to make stronger the tomes and accentuations of the images.” (PH)