16mm Film Workshop with Philip Hoffman

March 24-27, 2007

Participants will shoot 16 mm film using Bolex cameras, hand process the film and then transfer it into a digital environment.

Cost: $125 + gst
Film extra (~15/roll)

`Process Cinema’ explores a creative tradition in alternative filmmaking that is improvisational and interactive. Through this process-driven methodology, the screenplay as governing document is replaced by a fluid integration of writing, shooting and editing, not necessarily in that order. Drawing upon a range of readings and screenings, students will explore this method of working through practical exercises.

This way of working `through’ process has a comparative body of work in music, through jazz, in art, through `action painting’, in the performative aspects of the sketchbook or through `spontaneous prose’ in beat poetry.

`Process Cinema’ mentors students through practical exercises in shooting and film processing.

Since his arrival on the Canadian experimental film scene in the late 1970s, Toronto based filmmaker Philip Hoffman has long been recognized as Canada’s pre-eminent diary filmmaker. He has been using aspects of his own life to deconstruct the Griersonian legacy of documentary practice in Canada. Working directly upon the material of film, Hoffman pays careful attention to the way one perceives by foregrounding the image and its creation. Poetic, personal, provocative, and perceptive, the films of Philip Hoffman constitute one of the most important bodies of work in Canadian independent cinema.