Mike Hoolboom

A man faces his approaching death. He takes a journey, his last perhaps, and ends up at the Pensão Globo in Lisbon, where he sets out on aimless excursions through the city. The film depicts a life in a state of transition. Sometimes it's like I'm already gone, become a ghost of myself.

BEACON is a montage of location shots filmed at ten different places around the world. These sites are connected by the fact that each is located by the sea. Seamlessly combining travelogue footage and appropriated clips from feature films, BEACON produces a single, imaginary locale. Distant echoes of stories of the sea mingle with the banality of today's touristy beachlife. In its collage of places of expectation and with its seductive prospects of the sea, Beacon sets off on a journey with no distinct destination.

A gay man reminisces about his deceased lover, a victim of AIDS.

"Hoolboom" is a film that Arts Toronto commissioned local filmmaker Wrik Mead to make based on his impressions of fellow filmmaker Mike Hoolboom. With some collaboration from Mike, Wrik has produced a film about the body, self-awareness, and the art of film.

“In a tapestry of migratory luck, artifacts and shells, a mixed choir of images and sounds engages the paradox of a journey that loses all meaning once it reaches its end. The film’s westward inclination to the American shores of the Pacific, bound in a pitiless growth and decay, drives a dense montage, woven with guns and prayers.” - Gary Popovich

Matthias Müller's SLEEPY HAVEN is explicitly taking up the spirit of Kenneth Anger's FIREWORKS. SLEEPY HAVEN materializes fantasies of an erotic daydream; the film is a cocktail that merges Müller's own shots and found footage like a love act. Nude bodies of sailors are flaring up in flickering solarization effects; they are given an ardent aura of physical desire by this tattooing of the film emulsion. Müller only gradually changes his material metaphors to metaphors of love. But it is not only FIREWORKS the film is alluding to; there is yet another classic shimmering through Müller's imagery: Jean Genet's Un Chant d'Amour.

A terrible virus finally brings down the internet, and humans look out from the wreckage in the aftermath. Five weigh in with personal recollections: pensive, disbelieving, grieving, philosophical. We used to have movie stars and famous musicians. Now we had each other.

A paean to light, a glittering bodice of a film that rapturously unfolds its subject with a shimmering luminosity.

After a purported bike accident, the nameless amnesiac undertakes audio-visual therapy by producing a series of one-minute shots through the streets of Toronto. The result is an episodic love letter set against the city's intimacies and haunts, populated by old and new acquaintances, while the disembodied voiceover weighs in on gender, animal, and the end of literary culture. Beginning from the position of the body in fugue, Incident Reports traces the most intimate of daily life changes through chronicling a back beat of the city's endless transformation.

One hundred children were dying every day in Gaza when I made this hopeless poem of hope. How to step into a new kind of Jerusalem without becoming what we feared? How to leave behind every notion of the chosen few, and embrace the ones along the way, finding a promised land in each other. Based on an excerpt from the poem "Red Sea: April 2002" by Aurora Levins Morales, a disabled Puerto Rican Jewish writer and activist.

Film is made out of gelatin that comes from horses. They’re waiting to be slaughtered, so that pictures can be made. Many years ago we learned the language of our masters. Though we couldn’t help wondering why so few of you bothered to learn ours. Three scenes featuring horses, remembering Jacinto. The first is a daytime forest haunting that winds up at a carousel, the second a rainy street in Portugal, the finale a nighttime vigil of fire and water.

Devils fall in love in Seattle in a black comedy of sex, machines and flight. Photographed a frame at a time over three days, 1+1+1 shows us the wordless tale of unlikely lovers, the first appearing as a hovering devil in flight, excreting a vegetable life, while her's clock-spitting, bathing-besuited figure lifts weights in a frank measure of indifference. Their touch promotes a shimmering aura of light, a celestial forcefield which they lash against, finally retiring to the kitchen with a clutch of tools to fine tune desire. Could I fix you? Donning each other's clothes, they fly off together to the strains of Strauss's Blue Danube Waltz.

The epilogue of the 9-part feature Imitations of Life (2003).

The March of Time produced 200 newsreels from 1935-1951, shown in movie theatres once per month. In an 18-minute film from August 1939 film called Metropolis, cameramen travelled across New York City, gathering scenes of its 7.5 million people. This short stitches together scenes shot in Harlem, along with outtakes from that shoot, preserved at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington. This footage has been “restored” using AI, image resolution is HD, frame rate 60 fps, colour and grain added. The voice-over offers reflections on the way these images were framed through an apartheid lens, a reflection of the white men who ran and staffed the company. W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin and Christina Sharpe offered second thoughts. How many movies are made without any pictures in them? [Overview courtesy of Mike Hoolboom]

Based on Hito Steyerl’s bracing 2009 essay of the same name, Cut looks at how cinema and the assembly line both cut the body in new ways, organizing newly urban work forces. A dreamy collage essay made of scraps and fragments, with asides from Susan Sontag on Disney fascism, and Paul B. Preciado on the cost of living in a body.

"Panic Bodies is a 70-minute, six-part exploration of the ways we experience the body's betrayals: disease, decline and death. The film is a panorama of emotionally charged recollections of strange relatives and estranged siblings, staged recreations of fast-fading pasts and personal mythologies, and reflections on the anxious states created by the body's fragile claims on time and space. It's about being a stranger in your own skin. Panic Bodies perfects the phantom quality of any good work about mourning, but it is not reducible to that. It is also enlivened by the intimacy that comes from having made a spectacle of personal secrets." (Kathleen Pirrie Adams, Xtra)

This Marxist love story asks: could the couple also be a form of resistance? Essay notes on marriage, microcinema, and the art of projection. With guest appearances by Occupy, Pussy Riot protesters, a runaway goat, two poodles, an army of street marchers, Mos Def, Frankenstein and cinema’s first kiss.

This ten-minute video lecture was commissioned by Haema Svanesan and Marina DeMaio who are putting together a Buddhism and Art confab called In the Present Moment: Buddhism, Contemporary Art, and Social Practice at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in October, 2019. I was supposed to be on a panel but fear of flying led to further video steals. The text came out of sessions with Emotion Focused Therapy maestro Bill Gaynor. Anne Carson and Karl Ove Knaussgard make appearances, along with a bevy of writers and meditators. What if the pause before speaking was equal to the speaking itself? How to grant attention, to celebrate even, the moments of pause?

In a Red Cross hospital in Vietnam, the young white nurse tends his wounds. Drawn from the archives of the Red Cross in Geneva.

Queering the haj. A man recollects a moment (was it any longer than that?) in the aptly named city of Mecca. A conversation ensues in the crowd. The touch of language. Framing shots by luminous shooter Taravat Khalili. Commissioned by LIFT for the Jacques Madvo project.

Is it the oldest dream? Giving birth to my father. Shot on a single starry afternoon.

Part 3 of 7-part bio-feature Public Lighting (2004).

How to use this old technology of the postcard, with its marriage of image and text, its insistence that every exchange has two-sides which can never be considered at the same time, to write oneself back into the world? The traveller alights in Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, even in Canada, finding words for the old wounds, sitting for a portrait in the middle of the city, out of doors, alone in a crowd. The military ghosts are never far, their costumes barely able to cover up the casual brutalities, even as the city’s citizens come together in unexpected formations, inventing new lives and conversations, like the plant life that flourishes around them, as resplendent as weeds. One of his most perfect and most personal reflections, a letter from the heart.

How to show the long bus ride began in the dark to visit the husband in jail? The repetition which is new every morning. The feeling of seeing him. The company of others who are like and unlike? Her newly digital speech is broken and slowly restitched. The trial of rejoining the wounds of language and family. And at last, the unnamed citizens can be granted again a title: Palestine. We must be in Palestine.