The Road Ended at the Beach

In making this film I collected images and sound over six years of travel (not continuous) through Canada. Keeping daily both filmic and written records. I focussed on people and places, my relationship to them, and the changes that occurred between each visit. I would collect these images freely: later to examine and make meaning of during the editing process. in this film I started to consciously pursue the relationship between the formal chronicle of events and my memory of those events. – P.H.
“Phil Hoffman’s work is very much work about what it is to take a picture of some incident, of what happens to the relationship between the camera and the subject: it’s very much concerned with the nature of photography, and with questions of time that one would expect people who are interested in photography to deal with. I mean a photograph is always from the past and one of his films is about trying to go back to the Beat period and resurrect it, in a sense, and what he finds out, of course, is that the past is unrecoverable.” – Bruce Elder, Cinema Canada.