Landscape with Shipwreck: First Person Cinema and the Films of Philip Hoffman

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

The editors appropriately acknowledge Philip Hoffman as an accomplished
first person experimental filmmaker, film instructor, and founder of
Film Farm; pay fitting tribute to Marian McMahon, his partner of 13
years before her recent and untimely death; and create an invaluable
compendium of insights into the theory and practice of first person
cinema. Like Inside the Pleasure Dome, Hoolboom’s earlier and equally
important collection of documents about underground cinema, Landscape
with Shipwreck bubbles over with eclectic contributions, from filmmaker
Peter Greenaway’s personal letter of support for Hoffman’s grant
application to Canada Council, to personal tributes by friends and
colleagues, to notes of appreciation to Hoffman and McMahon from former
Film Farm students and residents, to diary entries and copies of
transcripts of interviews between Hoolboom and Hoffman, to formal
critical analyses and exegesis of Hoffman’s films by such scholars as
Peter Harcourt and Brenda Longfellow.

Interestingly, about a third of the entries contain no direct reference
to Hoffman or his 16 16-millimetre films and five video installations.
Instead, they focus on other filmmakers’ and theoreticians’ concepts
of experimental cinema. In Polly Ullrich’s engaging essay, “The
Workmanship of Risk: The Re-emergence of Handcraft in Postmodern Art,”
the central theme is artistic creativity per se. Mike Cartmell’s
signature piece, “Landscape with Shipwreck,” is a particularly
fascinating record of his thoughts about “the stuff of cinema.” This
valuable collection furthers our understanding not only of Hoffman’s
work, but of the larger context of autobiographical experimental cinema
within which it is located.