Mike Hoolboom

"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.

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.

'Amy, is narrated by a model (Liisa Repo-Martell) who’s painfully uncomfortable with her own body and “old woman’s” face. Astonishing closing image is a tightly composed telephoto shot on the start of a marathon race among young schoolgirls, dashing toward and then across the screen in ultra-slo-mo, and accompanied by a girls’ chorus hauntingly singing Brian Wilson’s God Only Knows. Widely eclectic lensing and looks in various media and in color and black-and-white flow nicely from one section to the next, aided by gifted editor Mark Karbusicky.' ~ Robert Koehler, Variety - Part 7 of 7-part bio-feature Public Lighting (2004).

“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

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

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.

“In order to take the next step (not forward or backwards, but only: to go on) it is often necessary to lean on a picture made by someone else, sometimes a word will do, a gesture, the look on a stranger’s face. Colin Campbell made the next step possible for me so I took up a video camera (his pictures were my company, and my camera accompanied his pictures). Between his images of the past and mine, Colin Campbell emerged as a Cold Warrior, as an artist who would fight the Cold War with stereo. Yes, a stereo artist! Fascination contains only the pictures I would find in my camera when I reviewed the material in the morning, after all the serious work had been done (while I and all the others who spoke his language, lay sleeping).” MH

A love story set in the global anti-austerity demonstrations. As citizens take back their streets, two women meet and fall in love. What geometry of desire will help overthrow the state? What micro-politics of sharing and communality will provide fuel for demonstrations that will remove and replace the neo-liberal consensus? Cast in a palimpsest of images and sounds, as if there were no way to separate inside and out, the street and the bedroom.

A rework of the new iPhone 15 commercial featuring a singing wall socket. In place of the machine loneliness of the original, a different song from the early Vito Acconci playbook. A direct address to the viewer/listener from a virtual assistant. The new ambient intelligence promises security, rapid response, predictive analysis, microgeneration, efficiency. Here it delivers funwashing messages from the cloud for users in a performative essay on domotics. Talk back from the data harvest and Orwell’s “never sleeping ear.” To challenge them is to “fight the future.”

Mike Hoolboom reflects in 27 brief scenes on the life of his father, who died in June 2017. Using home movies, snapshots and found footage, he creates a portrait of a exceedingly clever, yet evanescent father figure haunted by the war that sent his own father to a concentration camp. Ultimately the family moved to Canada. This political history, intertwining dreams and personal experience, seems loose and associative, but first impressions can be deceiving.

Simon Weil wrote that attention is the rarest kind of generosity. How to extend this generosity to a single photograph, made in 1949 in the port city of Haifa, in the new state of Israel? There are three soldiers from the Haganah watching over a Palestinian father and his three sons. Each face has a story to tell as they take a long walk into exile, feel their homeland in moments that seem to last forever, but are never long enough. The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through. Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. Every separation is a link. Simone Weil

Jason returns with another letter to Madonna, thanking her for letting him be her "mistress".

Eva Marie Rodbro’s embedded ethnographic maestro short, originally shot in Brownwood, Texas in 2009, is given a fan remake. Night vision animal life and teen hangouts conjure a temporary and fragile collective, while conversation fragments, alternately performed and raw, shouted and whispered, collide.

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.

Begun in a three-week seminar at the Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD) in October 2016, seventeen of us began an excavation together, immersing ourselves in a selection of Red Cross shorts made over nearly a century in countries round the world. This nearly wordless feature-length ensemble has five parts/chapters: The Man Who Stopped Time (Greece), Disappearances (Switzerland), Photo Shoot Location Yemen (Yemen), Beirut Grammar (Lebanon) and Mine Clearing (Mozambique). Each chapter adopts a different formal strategy in order to open up a new conversation with these picture remains, sometimes scribbling over the pictures, or re-presenting the material as a series of friezes, fading every shot, or slowly accumulating them. The hope is time travel, to venture to the other side of the image.

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.

Originally cast as the second part of a six-part feature Panic Bodies (1998), the original 16mm negatives were rescued courtesy of the Cinematheque Quebecoise, then rescanned, recut, and reimagined. They were shot in 1996, the year the AIDS cocktail arrived. It’s not uncommon during illness to experience one’s body grow as large as the world, here the body is figure and ground, friend and enemy, projection surface fragments, memory machine. I asked the excellent performance artist Ed Johnson if he could come by and perform in this psychodrama of loss and longing.

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.

Personal film essay about two pandemics: AIDS and Coronavirus. Body memorials, survivor stories, remembrances. Both plagues are reframed by neoliberalism and its central mythology of personal freedom, brilliantly laid out in Hito Steyerl’s essay gem “Freedom from Everything” which is adapted and shapeshifted here. Pronouncing on the new precarity of the freelancer, Hito wryly observes that they have “freedom from everything,” from a good job, health care, affordable housing… Featuring Maggie Thatcher, Guy Fawkes, George Michael, James Baldwin, Akira Kurosawa and David Wojnarowicz.

A movie essay using theory fragments from porn studies pioneer Linda Williams, radical gender theorist Paul Preciado, feminist theorists Hortense Spillers, Karen Barad and more. A variety of hazy, lo fi clips rub up against an isolated digerati immersed in temporary pornutopias. Why not name it a small collection, a modest archive of sexual imageries and pleasures? The relationship between monopoly capitalism and sexual imaging is laid bare, along with the production of a gendered subject, the question of post-pornography and its new identity formations.

Tasked to produce a short intro to my feature-length essay Cut, I turned to the origins of the close-up, in a scene featuring camera person Billy Bitzer and director D.W. Griffiths. How to live in this new body, with its cuts, its fissures and fractures?

News from another pandemic, the one that "changed everything" before it fell out of the news cycle and collective memory, except for the newly infected or those who, like myself, managed a new life after death. Based on a text by David Wojnarowicz.

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.

Based on dreams (waking and non-waking) by pals and acquaintances of noted American writer Lucy Corin, the night after the epochal US election of 2016. A bevy of speakers weigh in on the new world.