Bachelor’s Bluff (2005) takes place on a promontory above a point with a lighthouse at the far end. As waves roll out of the dark ocean into the curve of the beach below, a solitary young man moves around aimlessly on the heights. He throws stones at the sea in the headlights of a 1960 Ford Starliner that he has left running. The only sound is the sighing of the waves that animate the infinite space of the void beyond. Is this tiny isolated figure on the edge of the black beyond a spurned lover, an unhappy teen? Is he angry, anguished, thwarted, misunderstood, a little drunk or desperately lonely?
The scene, for which Hoffos has created a foreground, middle ground and deep space, all in a box, is an illusion of the void in miniature, and quite a feat. He uses mirrors to expand the vista in a different way than in Circle Street, so that the lighthouse is not multiplied. That would spoil things by turning a realistic, even familiar scene into science fiction. Masking and lighting make the mirrors disappear, and the lighthouse beacon shining in the spectator’s eyes increases the dark of night and the depth of the space. Miraculously, Hoffos created the wave effect by videotaping two crescents of bristol board as he moved them across a piece of black velvet. The addition of a digital effect softened the edges of the whitecaps.
In the scene 65 Footers (2003), a lone woman paces the deck of a yacht tied up at a vast, otherwise deserted dock under a high bridge. This scene has overtones of film noir but is more closely related to the horror genre. As the yacht rocks back and forth in the eerily lit waves, the shadowy tentacles of a giant squid appear on the hull.
The faint shape of the squid is discernible beneath the water, yet the whole scene has a subterranean feel that makes it seem almost like a premonition. The presence of the leviathan, which the woman senses and has come on deck to investigate, creates a moment of Hitchcockian suspense from which the scene offers no release.
The video projections in Scenes from the House Dream run on loops that vary in length from five or 10 seconds to 10 minutes. Although it is not immediately apparent, the yacht, as well as the figure of the woman and the lapping water, is a video projection. The boat is Hoffos’s first projection of something other than a human figure into a model. In his first use of split-channel video, the projections of the woman and the yacht are synchronized. And the water, created with cut paper and a blue light bulb, is his first projection of a water effect. Bachelor’s Bluff came two years later.
Airport Hotel (2004), which shows a close-up of a woman alone in her hotel room, is seen through an oval-shaped portal rather than a rectangular frame. She paces and smokes cigarettes, stepping out of sight to make a drink and again to change into a Japanese robe. She paces and smokes and then changes back into street clothes. Duke Ellington is playing on the soundtrack. Outside the room’s sliding windows, planes taxi past on the tarmac in the cold blue night. The hotel room is furnished in a generic modernist style and bathed in warm orange light. The view into the room is close enough that the spectator can see the woman’s pensive face. What is she waiting for?
The portal suggests that she is being spied on through the peephole in the door from the corridor outside. In fact, this is similar to what the spectator, feeling something like a voyeur, is doing while looking at the scene from the installation corridor. The scene sets up the equivalent of a point-of-view shot, making the spectator another character in the fictional space. Like the woman in the fiction, the reallife spectator waits for something to happen with rising expectations.
Airport Hotel is unique in its use of the point-of-view shot, and also in employing two models to create what Hoffos calls a “forced perspective.” The room is dollhouse scale, which is 1:12, while the planes and airport buildings beyond it are 1:500 scale. Hoffos created a forced perspective—one of the oldest perceptual tricks in movies—in Circle Street and Bachelor’s Bluff too, but the scale shift is most dramatic in Airport Hotel.
The zoom shot of CP Fail (2008), one of the most recent of the scenes, reveals a dark forest in which a train can be seen through the trees. Three luminous figures in the window of one of the train cars quickly draw the viewer’s eye. The man, woman and child are sharing a can of cold beans. Their conversation is barely audible above the sound of crickets and a faraway train whistle. But there is no track and the train, a ruin that is angled away from the spectator as if it were headed deeper into the trees, has no wheels.
Thin moonlight shows that the forest floor is a bog, with standing water among the trees that seems to stretch on forever. The family is stranded, isolated and alone, going nowhere, small figures in another kind of vastness. Hoffos makes this wilderness of close trees seem not only vast but claustrophobic, as if there is no escaping it. A site of deep primal fears, the forest is a trap reclaiming a failed civilization.
A scene from a terrifying nightmare, CP Fail comes near the end of Scenes from the House Dream. It is not the very end, though. What the ending really is it would not do to tell, except to say that as in awakening, or in waking dreams, you will know you have been dreaming.
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