Opening
Series: an interview with Philip Hoffman
I
saw Philip Hoffman's film(s), Opening
Series, recently at Cinecycle. The order in which
the twelve film segments (silent, Super 8 re-filmed onto 16mm, and each made up
of three shots of varying lengths ranging from seven seconds to two and a half minutes) were projected was left up to the audience
members, who arranged them as they wished, according to abstract coloured paintings on the film boxes. (Phil made paintings,
which he colour xeroxed and
glued onto the boxes.) So some control was shifted to the audience, who
collectively contribute to the order of the final film.
BS:
Can you talk about the changes that Opening
Series indicate in your work
PH:
My first films, On the Pond (1978)
through to Kitchener-Berlin (1990),
deal with ‘autobiography’ and its relation to history and memory. I was trying
to excavate a past that I slept through. It was a way of trying to find out
what went on by letting images, both past and present, speak. With Opening Series I'm trying to deal with what's happening now,
even though I've learned that I carry my past with me all the time. I'm no
longer setting out, for instance, to make a film about my relationship to my
mother and her family as I did with passing
through/torn formations (1988). I'm developing an archive of suuper-8
images that can be taken spontaneously, constantly and with little expense.
This seemed a good place to start after Kitchener-Berlin.
I wanted a method that was less rigid, just to shoot without knowing ahead what
I would do with it.
BS:
So you could be more responsive in your filming?
PH:
Yes, more in the moment. Then I started working with the material to make each
a 3-part/3-shot film. At the same time I was painting-that was in
BS:
So you did edit the film segments. On what basis?
PH:
The editing echoes the haiku form I had worked with in Somewhere Between Jalastotitlan and Encarnacion (1984) where the images were drawn from everyday
life and the text between the images was inspired by Haiku. Now the three shots
relate to the three-line form. I wanted to do something strictly visual. I tried
to work rhythmically within a common structure of three shots.
B.S.:
In a book on Zen meditation, the author uses a Haiku poem as an example of
"bare attention: learning to see and observe with simplicity and
directness. Nothing extraneous."
PH:
I'm trying to develop my own language or game, like the I Ching. This
is an ‘opening,’ a beginning and a continuing (the stress on the -ing of opening). I could go anywhere from here, sound,
narrative etc. I've done the first
twelve and I'm
still collecting and painting. I've screened it mostly with people I know or in
small groups. I let people pick the order for each projection, and it's
exciting to see the different meanings that come out from the many various
combinations. There's an intersection of my energy in the making of the films
and the energy of others in the projecting-in their choosing.
BS:
You see different things in the films depending on the order...
PH:
And people's effect on the screening process. The screenings are more personal
because of the individual selections.
BS:
The meaning in the images are not so referentially bound, they're open. Coming
back to my opening comment that control has shifted to the audience, how is it
for an artist making a piece to have it changed? Is it like a sculpture with
parts that viewers move around or more like participatory sculpture or is it
that each segment is really a film on its own and so the audience is in the role of
programmer/curator, arranging the order that the films are viewed in.
PH:
Each viewer finds their own meanings out of the sequences and their various
collisions. This is really true of any film viewing experience. People pick up
different meanings in films based on their own personal history, perception,
cultural background.
BS:
Opening Series makes us aware in a
concrete or physical way of the process that goes on unconsciously all the time
when viewing films.
P.H.:
At the Innis screening at Cinecycle,
the order worked out well; for instance, the first shot seen of Egypt set up
the idea for the others shot there, that is, of a tourist in the Middle East,
because the shot was of a foreign (white male) photographer posing a Bedouin
man for a picture. And the last one had the film credits!
BS:
But really the order is just chance..
PH:
Synchronicity Jung would say. Mental energy affects physical energy. This
method creates a place where the conscious and unconscious can play. Recently I
showed the film in
BS:
How does it feel working in Super 8 after 16?
PH:
I've always used some Super 8, but the idea here was to have more freedom..
BS:
Because it's less expensive..
PH:
To get away from expenses, and to make filming more a part of life. I can keep
the small camera in my pocket and shoot every day.
BS:
Collecting footage, this is similar to how you've worked previously..
PH:
Yes, but I don't have a specific subject when I start, like my family or some
biographical enquiry. The Super-8 material is an archive to draw from. Films surface.
BS:
Did the idea to work in shorter pieces have anything to do with how screenings
of experimental films are organized, or distribution factors?
PH:
I was getting tired of seeing my films always in the same way. So this
projection idea gives something to the audience and to myself.
The screenings don't become repetitive and boring, but keep growing with
meaning for me. I hope they resonate for others.
BS:
There are certain motifs in Opening
Series: light, the natural world, windows.
PH:
These seem a fitting opening for a beginning again with film—light and windows.
For my previous films, the starting point was autobiographical, now the
starting points are basic elements—light, rhythm, colour.
BS:
…things that relate to film itself...
PH:
…but not in the sense of structural or minimalist film; the films are not
sparsely materialist.
BS:
But most minimalist or materialist films are experiences, experienced through
film, experienced while being viewed...some very intensely, and so might even
be thought of as sublime, or experiences of 'presence.' Perhaps what you are
interested in is keeping the context, the situational reference for the light.
Keeping the everyday context and locating the 'spiritual' in this realm, not
'on high' or other-worldly. In the use of light, this type of imagery, and
loose connections between images, I find a similarity to the last section of Kitchener/Berlin.
PH:
Yes, it's silent as well.
BS:
Why is Opening Series silent?
PH:
In this film I'm trying to get back to a way of knowing without words. My films
started quite quietly, mostly intertitles. ?O, ZOO! was a
critique of the voice-of-god narrator.Then with passing through, I peaked with words,
it's filled with words. Then K/B is
back to silence. The way I've used language in my films leads to multiplicity
as opposed to authority.
BS: In the Pargiters, Virginia Woolf wrote this opinion about men's books on war, heroism,
honour and the like: "I think the best these men
can do is to not talk about themselves any more."
And Jane Marcus, writing about Virginia Woolf said,
"She was weary of words as weapons... male discourse of immense
proportions." Of course, documentary/propaganda films have known the value
of voice-over in directing the meaning of images and doing the audiences
thinking for it.
PH: For me, the silence in this new work is a
returning to the magic of the darkroom—starting up new work.
BS:
What is the relation between the Egyptian and the
Canadian footage and the rural/ness of both.
PH:
I wanted a certain empty feeling; nature can be sparse. The continuing segments
can grow and evolve, maybe into narrative sections or city sections or with
sound. I wanted to begin simply with quiet contemplation.
BS:
But the introduction of 'foreign' footage, the
PH:
It lends a sense of 'here' and 'there,' at least in terms of the landscape and
climate.
BS:
Why take your camera when you go away, given the problems of filming 'foreign'
places. What rights do we have to shoot? What do we take?
PH: While I was in
BS:
When you did film at the pyramids you show a close-up shot of the stone with a
little bird, like a sparrow, perched on it.
PH:
There are similarities between the light, the birds and their rhythms of
viewing. In whatever world we live in there are these things.
BS:
It’s not an oppositional view...