John Hoffman was a masterful editor of montage sequences for several Hollywood studio features.

With his colleague, the Serbian montagist Slavko Vorkapich, Hoffman made two striking visual tone poems, Moods of the Sea

Moods of the Sea

Moods of the Sea is a non-narrative experimental film by Slavko Vorkapich and John Hoffman, set to the music of Felix Mendelssohn known as the Hebrides Overture....

(aka Fingal's Cave

Fingal's Cave

Fingal's Cave is a sea cave on the uninhabited island of Staffa, in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland, part of a National Nature Reserve owned by the National Trust for Scotland. It is formed entirely from hexagonally jointed basalt columns, similar in structure to the Giant's Causeway in Northern...

, 1941) and Forest Murmurs (1947). The former film is set to Felix Mendelssohn

Felix Mendelssohn

Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Barthóldy , use the form 'Mendelssohn' and not 'Mendelssohn Bartholdy'. The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians gives ' Felix Mendelssohn' as the entry, with 'Mendelssohn' used in the body text...

's Hebrides Overture

Hebrides Overture

The Hebrides Overture , Op. 26, also known as Fingal's Cave , is a concert overture composed by Felix Mendelssohn. Written in 1830, the piece was inspired by a cavern known as Fingal's Cave on Staffa, an island in the Hebrides archipelago located off the west coast of Scotland...

and was restored in 2004 by film preservation expert David Shepard.

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