Chimera

The film consists of collected, diaristic images amassed through Hoffman’s travels. Uluru, Russian shoppers, a Cairo market, and day to day images from home and away … make floating appearances. These have been gathered on the run, and then reconstituted with an uncanny ephemeral floating rhythm, a dance of light, and replaying, with commendable control, the idea of visual music, visual jazz. Though the method of collection may have had an air of arbitrariness about it, the meticulous construction and focus on rhythm in the finished piece suggest an artist who has learnt to master technique so as to let it speak for him about ‘other things’.
Dirk de Bruyn (Excerpted from Melbourne Film Festival Catalogue ’96)
” Made over the last three years, CHIMERA, is a patchwork picture of several places, peoples and spaces. The splayed visual ‘documents’ inner fluctuations and explosive exteriors during the time of terrific change. CHIMERA is ‘a multi headed beast’, ‘a fish of remarkable appearance’, ‘illusion’. CHIMERA is a collective chant. In 1989 I finished the film Kitchener-Berlin and put a close to a cycle of work which dealt directly with my-self, 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. Chimera was shot during a time when I had the opportunity to travel, a time of tremendous change; between 1989 and 1992 in Leningrad, London, Egypt, Helsinki, Sydney and Uluru; was optically printed and edited in Helsinki in 1992; completed in Mount Forest in 1995.” – P.H.