What these ashes wanted. . - Short Takes - movie review

TAKE ONE, May, 2002 by Tom McSorley

2001 56m, p/d/ph/ed Philip Hoffman.

The image is not enough, though sometimes, it comes close. Toronto experimental filmmaker Philip Hoffman's most recent film is a rich, densely textured lament for and celebration of his life partner, Marian McMahon, who died suddenly and unexpectedly several years ago. A mosaic of memory, the film weaves together images of McMahon, of their farmhouse before and after, of places visited together and apart. Hoffman's dark intimations of death and a sonic collage of impassioned messages left on the answering machine. There is also a poignant explanation of Hoffman's own role from childhood as the family photographer. Throughout this courageous work, Hoffman investigates the oddness of the processes, technological and otherwise, that we invent in order to remember. At the same moment, he also sanctifies them. More than a strictly personal work that excludes the viewer, Hoffman's film transcends its own intimate power to ponder time itself. Indeed, its diary structure suggests and even demonstrates how the cinema, with images and sounds, can create, destroy and reconstruct temporal experience. What these ashes wanted constitutes a poetics of loss, a valentine to the lived paradox of the very real presence of absence. In the elegiac tradition, it is also an affirmation of the tough, sad, beautiful burden we must undertake to care for those who have departed and those who remain.