Publisher's Synopsis
Philip Hoffman has been making personal documentary films for over 20 years. Straining history through his own fictions, Hoffman's work takes on some formidable themes: memory, family, the making of official and unofficial histories, the ethics of representation, love and loss in the time of AIDS. He has devoted his life to examining the narrow aperture each of us uses to bring our own experience into focus. As many of the writers in this volume will attest, telling personal stories is dangerous work. This is an untidy stew of critics and artists -- the well-known and the up-and-coming. Using letters, diary entries, essays, interviews, scripts, drawings and photographs, each contributor traces the work of Philip Hoffman through his or her personal and artistic world, using the technique of the autobiographer to answer the question, how does one write about film? This is cultural criticism at its most potent, a kind of writing that is beside itself and without regret.
