Two small pieces today on one of Canada's most prolific advocates for his fellow moving image artists, Mike Hoolboom. The first comes from a recent publication, Clint Enns's edited collection on the films of Mike Hoolboom, Mike Hoolboom: Work; the second is an encyclopedia entry on Hoolboom, from Moments of Perception: Experimental Film in Canada (ed. Jim Shedden and Barbara Sternberg).
S.B.
THE MAN WHO LEFT HIS WILL ON FILM
by Stephen Broomer
Across its six episodes, Mike Hoolboom’s Panic Bodies (1998) undertakes a tour of mortality. This omnibus film is an act of transition in a career that had begun in material inquiry, moving towards thematization, careful and memorial reflection, and more ecstatic and pliable forms. Hoolboom’s earliest films, like Song for Mixed Choir and The White Museum, had employed formal traits of cinema itself (the place of image, the role of sound) to survey spectatorship. By the time that he made the films that comprise Panic Bodies, Hoolboom was already exploring broader themes, of social and personal reverie, the betrayal of sensual experience, the inevitability of an end. The shift was occasioned by Hoolboom’s own HIV+ diagnosis in 1989, and begins to manifest in his work with Frank’s Cock (1993). The diagnosis had been at the heart of his work through the mid-1990s: the episodes of Panic Bodies are at once intimate and universal, drawing from various traditions of address, the epistolary, the monologue, the memoir, marking Hoolboom’s definitive maturation into his own voice. It is a film that casts the body as a playground, a grave, a bank of experience. Its component parts deal with the nature of bodily experience, provoking a sensual reverie as concerned with quality of life as it is with its central subject, death. Each segment is marked by a woodcut that suggest medieval craft, the animation of the dead, and the cosmo-symbolic order of the tarot.
In Positiv, articulating his experience of illness, Hoolboom’s monologue on the barriers between inner life and embodied experience is illustrated in a quartet of projections, a showcase for the filmmaker’s ability to personalize and enhance images from pop culture. In A Boy’s Life, the narrator speaks of the body as “playground and graveyard,” and in both this episode and the penultimate episode, Moucle’s Island, nude portraits give way to tender acts of onanism. The whole of Panic Bodies is a work of self-construction, declared in A Boy’s Life when its nude hero draws on himself. Its component parts culminate in Passing On, an episode in which scenes of youth at play pass inevitably into the silence of pure light, a poignance of release, an act of letting go.
Hoolboom would go on to become even more closely defined as a confessional filmmaker, even as he challenged such a label by also pursuing portrait documentaries and collaborations. His films, which have often prioritized personal narration, invite us into a confidence that has, through recent decades, spiralled into a grand project, one that connects quotidian observations with the dust of the west’s histories, its colonial sins, and its future. This in itself marks a departure from the artist who made Panic Bodies: as time has passed, Hoolboom commits to the possibilities of tomorrow.
MIKE HOOLBOOM
by Stephen Broomer
Mike Hoolboom began to make films while a student at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario, in the early 1980s, in a program that was focused on the possibilities of poetic documentary filmmaking anchored in humour, social concern, and an observational style. Among the filmmakers who came through Sheridan, Carl Brown, Michael Cartmell, Gary Popovich, Steve Sanguedolce, and Hoolboom were all beginning to experiment with the plasticity of the film image in ways that departed sharply from the strategies of their teachers.
Hoolboom’s earliest films engage in Debordian integrations of text and space that complicate the exchange between maker and viewer. This approach begins with Now, Yours (1981), wherein text, television commercials, a film countdown, and a game show combine as a critique of the theatrical space and its distinctions of high and low culture. Such direct address continues in The Big Show (1984), in which fourteen intertitles appear in white on black with a shifting, hand-processed background; the titles demand viewer participation, or suggest to the viewer modes of presence and awareness of their role, from “please stand” to “please move both hands together,” and bridging maker and viewer in a more direct union with such texts as, “make a sound only I can hear.” Hoolboom’s critique of the viewer experience evolves into White Museum (1986), in which the filmmaker delivers a 33-minute monologue on cinema, time, reality, and language, accompanied by an audio collage of pop songs and commercials; throughout, the projection is composed only of clear leader. When the monologue ends, an image finally appears, of light breaking through trees that have taken on a soft, inky texture.
This early trilogy of works is unified by its self-conscious attention to the experience of the audience, its declarations of self-awareness on the part of the filmmaker, and its intent to destabilize the traditional relation between maker and viewer in the suspension of a darkened theatre. In this Hoolboom shares in the vanguard thread of disruption and resistance in postmodernity, an aspect that would remain dominant in his work even as it joined further with a heightened interest in social justice following his diagnosis with HIV in 1989. In his earliest films, Hoolboom spoke as a challenger to the norms of experimental cinema, but it was after his diagnosis that his work became more explicitly autobiographical and personal in nature, as he began to make work that shared in the documental and diaristic slant that had dominated much Canadian experimental film, but particularly that of his former teacher Rick Hancox and his contemporaries Philip Hoffman, Barbara Sternberg, and R. Bruce Elder.
While Hoolboom had begun by making films about formal self-consciousness, he soon began to integrate other aspects of hybridized fiction and documentary into his work—for instance, with Frank’s Cock (1993), in which an unnamed, fictional narrator (Callum Keith Rennie) performs a monologue about his partner, Frank, who has been diagnosed with AIDS, an account that Hoolboom based on the life of a friend he had met through the PWA (People With AIDS) movement. As with White Museum, the narration is met by a formal challenge, in this case the presence of several coexisting projections breaking the screen into quadrants. This strategy draws Hoolboom’s docudrama back towards the disruptive, polyphonous forms of experimental cinema, counterbalancing the cinematic realism of the monologue and performance. The films that Hoolboom made in the 1980s had gravitated to minimalistic designs, and his minimalism became most arch in White Museum. After his diagnosis with HIV, Hoolboom’s work moved in the opposite, maximalist direction, embracing polyphony, the integration of many distinct parts. He had adhered to minimalism in a way that grounded him in a late manifestation of the structural film movement; as his work further transformed he sampled genres, making a critical, diaristic travelogue (Mexico, 1992, with Steve Sanguedolce), an archival documentary (Letters from Home, 1996), and a transgressive, omnibus psychodrama (House of Pain, 1998).
Hoolboom continued to explore the AIDS crisis through a suite of works collected as Panic Bodies (1998), which in its six parts integrates Hoolboom’s personal voice, the borrowed voices of interview subjects and scripted texts, and a rapid personalization of mass culture images, a cohabitation of comedy, tragedy, outrage. Component parts function as discrete and individual works that combine to a thesis: for example, 1+1+1 (1993), in which a man and a woman perform comic, violent “repairs” on one another through a gauze of flickering red, is distinct from Moucle’s Island (1998), in which more sombre photography of an aged female figure transitions into a montage of archival nudist footage as the woman’s voiceover explores her feelings about memory, time and the body. As an assembly of such contrasting, individual parts, Panic Bodies reconciles the transgressive and kinetic with the meditative and minimalist, often through dense images integrated by fades or by the steady pulse of solarized film processing. Hoolboom’s emphasis on portraiture and storytelling, and the integration of his authorial presence with that of his subject, became a defining character of his later, increasingly documental work. Hoolboom soon followed Panic Bodies with more omnibus films: Imitations of Life (2003), a century-collapsing study of the interpolation of cinema, intimacy and memory, and Public Lighting (2004), a wide-ranging critical assessment of culture in the context of isolation, authenticity and community. For a time around the turn of the millennium, Hoolboom flirted with this scrapbooking approach, taking account of his work at intervals and building in the direction of modest cycles. He revisited this approach with his compilation feature Father Auditions (2019), which he has described as a “family choir,” an integration of five films in which family, paternity, and the endurance of the body are all taken as broad signs of invisible, tangential, intimate histories. In such omnibus works, Hoolboom is able to blend the essayistic qualities that had defined his films since White Museum with his documental, progressive sensibilities and his engagement with and subversion of mass media, thereby imbricating his work with a sense of his own probing consciousness.
By the early 2000s, a great deal of Hoolboom’s moving image practice had migrated from film to video. While he continued to work with both film and video, his approach to the latter was often distinct, particularly as he began to make long-form documental portraits, sometimes integrating found materials with his own footage. Tom (2002), on experimental filmmaker Tom Chomont, mixes mass culture images with the subject’s films and Hoolboom’s own stark portraiture of Chomont, footage that explores the artist’s fragility, living with Parkinson’s and HIV in his final years. Tom is confessional in its exploration of Chomont’s life, his illness, his incestuous relationship with his brother, and his relation to the S&M scene; in all of this it is also loving, embracing Chomont and casting light on his life, work, and endurance, in the shadow of his struggles. Chomont’s films were often portraits of friends, and consequently, Tom bears inevitable parallels to its subject’s own work. Since making Tom, Hoolboom has completed a number of feature-length portrait films: Fascination (2006), on the video artist Colin Campbell; Mark (2009), on his friend and collaborator Mark Karbusicky; and Judy versus Capitalism (2020), on the feminist activist Judy Rebick.
Alongside a steady stream of short films, Hoolboom has also made a number of other long-form films that stand apart from the compilation features and his documentaries. In Lacan Palestine (2012), Hoolboom discovers in the erasures, losses, and placeless condition of Palestine both a thoroughly western metaphor for the alienation of contemporary life and a confrontation with such colonial solipsism. Incident Reports (2016) offers the premise of an amnesiac whose therapeutic use of video as a memory-aid becomes both a city symphony of Toronto and a series of fleeting portraits. We Make Couples (2016) is another broad and discontinuous collision of essayistic commentary and storytelling, one that extends Hoolboom’s engagement with the metaphoric cinema of quotidian experience, mining the word “projection” from literal casting to its more symbolic, psychic occupation.
The prolificacy of Hoolboom’s output is not restricted to moving images; he has also been a committed chronicler of the scene of Canadian experimental film, beginning with a magazine, the Independent Eye, which he founded in 1988 while working as the experimental film officer at the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. The magazine featured artist statements, commentary on new works, trade news, and debates on the nature, definition, and motives of experimental filmmaking. Hoolboom’s contributions as a writer expanded from there to include thirty books, among them two collections of interviews with Canadian filmmakers (Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film in Canada, 2001, and Practical Dreamers: Conversations with Movie Artists, 2008); edited collections on filmmakers, for example, Deirdre Logue, David Rimmer, Jorge Lozano, and Christine Lucy Latimer; and Underground (2017), a history of Toronto’s Funnel Film Collective. Like the essayistic narration that features in many of his films, Hoolboom’s writing is often candid, evincing a personal style that balances familiarity and reportage, placing personal experience at the forefront but always in the service of underrepresented artists working at the margins of cinema.