Canadian filmmaker Philip Hoffman will be the protagonist of a series of screenings and a workshop in San Francisco & Oakland.
A Salon with Philip Hoffman
Friday, September 20, 2024 @ 7:30pm (doors 7pm)
16 Sherman Street, San Francisco
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.
Phil Hoffman Shorts: Of Memory & Association
Sunday, September 22, 2024, 8pm
Filmmaker in person
Admission: $12 (discount for members)
Canadian filmmaker Phil Hoffman (proprietor of the famed Film Farm) will be joining us to share a program of short films that reflect a mix of formal experiments and collaborations spanning his 45 year film practice. The program includes mid-career works which experiment with techniques of fragmentation through shooting, editing and photo-chemical processes, as well as more recent works, where the worlds of plants and animals work in tangent with film chemistry to create unique, process-based documents of natural ecosystems.
SCREENING: Kokoro is for Heart (1999, 16mm shown in DV), Chimera (1995, S8/16mm shown in DV), By the Time We Got to Expo (2015, S8/16mm shown in DV), endings (2024, 16mm shown in DV), Flowers #3 (Kissed by the Sun) (2024, 35mm shown in DV), Deep 1 (16mm/35mm shown in DV).
RELATED WORKSHOP: Phil will also be leading the Botanical Conversations Workshop earlier in the day on phyto and photogram making. See below for details and link to register.
Botanical Conversations: Making Images With Plants
Instructor: Philip Hoffman
Sunday, September 22, 2024, 12-5 PM
In-person at Shapeshifters Cinema
SOLD OUT
Working with photographic materials, Canadian filmmaker and founder of the Film Farm, Philip Hoffman will lead a workshop in a blend of phytography & photogram-making, using found plant and flower materials as both developer and subject. Through a process called Phytography (developed by filmmaker Karel Doing) the phytochemical properties of plants interact with photochemical emulsion. Through the Photogram-making process, the outline of the plant is photo-chemically rendered through a flash of light onto 16mm film. The workshop will embody an improvisational study and conversation between these two processes.
