Courtesy of the artist.
Distribution: Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Center and Vtape, Toronto.
Courtesy of the artist.
Distribution: Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Center and Vtape, Toronto.
The Invisible Man, Mike Hoolboom’s first solo exhibition in a gallery setting, brings together a few of the artist’s recent films presented as video installations. The film Invisible Man (2004), which lends its name to the exhibition, is featured in the main room of the Gallery. Also shown are five short features that were originally part of the anthology Imitations of Life (2003). In the Future is presented in the Gallery entrance, by way of an introduction to the show. In My Car and Rain are being shown together in succession, while Imitations of Life (which bears the same name as the anthology from which it is drawn) is projected separately in another room. Finally, Last Thoughts can be viewed along with two later short films–Tracks (2004) and Male Walk (2004)–in a small modular tower composed of three monitors.
CURATOR’S COMMENTARY
“Last night I had a dream: that the movies I had seen even in my womb were a prophecy. They were my future.”
– Mike Hoolboom, In the Future
The image world of film is a world we already share. Not merely entertainment, movies are patterns we grow into, but more than just as role models. As with the child already too old, they herald our future. At least this is a premise of Hoolboom’s installation, but it takes rearranging film to make this message obvious, to bring out its mythic structure.
Mike Hoolboom derives his films from a montage of images drawn from Hollywood film, found footage, and home movies. He pillages others’ products to produce streams of images stripped from their original narratives, but when the images are put back together according to another logic they now flow like a dream. (This dream logic is common to our reception of even the most realistic of Hollywood films and begins when the theatre lights descend.) In Hoolboom’s hands, film becomes an aqueous world shot through with light as if it was an embryonic fluid in which a form of consciousness comes to birth. Through his use of appropriated pictures, Hoolboom doesn’t produce an analysis of images, except perhaps as a poetics; he proposes a form of being. His is an ontology of cinema. But cinema also includes us, and this ontology becomes ours, so flows of images, flows of time, and flows of life are conflated in individual consciousnesses, the spectators that receive images and consume movies. This receptivity on our part to the film image lends credence to the phrase “a life in film” such that Hoolboom suggests, like the child, we too are born and die through the movies.
– Philip Monk, curator AGYU, Birth to Cinema : Mike Hoolboom’s Invisible Man
“In the future each moment will be photographed, doubled. Our bodies will grow transparent. We will enter each other like walking through a door, until at last we come to an end of the picture world, a world where we are also pictures. Our movies and photographs, will they help us understand our last place, teach us how to die?”
– Mike Hoolboom, In the Future
Curator: Philip Monk
Traveling exhibition organized by the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU), Toronto
The Works
In the Future, 2003, 3 min. 29 sec.
In the Future, which serves as an epigraph to the exhibition, is an excellent introduction to Hoolboom’s work, since it contains most of the themes, narrative strategies and film processes used by the filmmaker in the work on display. Made up mainly of sequences from documentary and Hollywood films showing film shoots and takes, In the Future questions the hegemonic hold of the cinematographic image on the structuring of our past and the articulation of our future.
Invisible Man, 2004, 18 min.
The eponymous installation Invisible Man relates the story of a man who claims to be rejuvenated each year, growing younger instead of older. The voice of this man (Hoolboom’s voice) is shadowed in the narrative by that of another and much younger man who claims to have written the script of the elder character’s life. Invisible Man looks at the way in which film shapes our personal histories, how it conditions our values, memories and dreams. Like the rejuvenated man who irremediably ends up disappearing and becomes invisible, we are completely immersed and annihilated by the power of images that dictate the script of our own lives.
Male Walk, 2004, 2 min. 10 sec.
This film, shown on the monitor at the top of the tower, shows three men of different ages moving against the backdrop of a blue sky. While the two older men walk, the young one rides a bicycle. There are no clues as to the location, nor do we know anything about where the characters are going. Male Walk is something of a metaphor for the various stages of life.
Last Thoughts, 2003, 6 min. 30 sec.
Last Thoughts is a veritable collage of superimposed images representing, for the most part, natural and organic elements. In the midst of these, we come upon a bedridden man hooked up to tubes, his head wrapped in white bandages. The new display device used to screen Last Thoughts–presented as the center component of the tower–becomes a silent film. The soundtrack, originally a mix of heterogeneous noises coupled with the sound of a heart monitor (suggesting the man’s death at the end of the film), has been replaced by silence, which leaves the narrative open and in a state of suspense.
Tracks, 2004, 2 min. 10 sec.
The last film presented at the bottom of the tower, Tracks features a worker repairing railway tracks in almost total darkness. The main source of light comes from the sparks produced by the equipment he is using. A few lights suggest a city further off.
Imitations of Life, 2003, 21 min.
Imitations of Life opens with documentary sequences relating to human conception. The narration (by a man, a woman and a young boy) is a commentary on the supremacy of Hollywood and its values. Hoolboom tries to show the means by which Hollywood has managed to replace our dreams, and how its films, which tell the same stories over and over, have come to shape the way we conceive the world. Excerpted texts also emphasize the manner in which films marks the passage of time, determine the historical record and forge our memory.
In my Car, 2003, 5 min.
In my Car is made up of sequences plundered from auteur films like Fellini’s
8 1/2 and Tarkovsky’s Stalker. These images illustrate an elegiac text, evoking the themes of faith, memory, solitude and the imagination.
Rain, 2003, 3 min. 30 sec.
Rain is a film composed of slow-motion images. Four protagonists adopt a confessional tone as they muse about their lives, hopes, memories and losses.
EXPLORE
- The shift of Hoolboom’s films from the screening room (the cinema) to the exhibition space (the gallery). The films are “transformed” by their new mode of presentation as installations.
- The filmmaker’s use of images gleaned from a variety of sources (Hollywood films, documentaries, home movies) to produce a different meaning, a new narrative.
- The way in which the use of familiar images highlights the editing involved in a more tangible manner, and makes us more aware of the film medium.
- The impact of the cinematographic image on our development and environment, as well as on the ways we construct our past and envision our future. In Hoolboom’s view, cinema imposes a certain vision of the world on us; its images become our own archives and constitute our memory.
- The ways in which our experience of death, the body and desire is shaped by cinema, by the filmed image.
- The relationship between narrative procedures and biographical discourse. Hoolboom makes use of narration (voice-overs, intertitles, excerpts of texts, etc.) to construct his own story, a fictional biography that he likes to invent, modify and rearrange.
A FEW QUESTIONS
- How, by what means, does the presentational device steer our reception of Hoolboom’s films? How does presenting them in their new installation format alter our experience of them?
- By being recontextualized in Hoolboom’s films, the images that he borrows and “redirects” become estranged from their original context. What kind of effects are thereby produced?
- How does our ability to recognize the borrowed sequences alter our reception of Hoolboom’s films. Do we need to identify the sources of the images to understand them?
- In a world saturated with images, we are constantly coming up against the endless repetition of the same stories, the same narratives, the same images. How do you think these images shape our memories and fashion our identities?
- How do documentaries and action films alter our relationship to science? To death? By what means do cinematographic images influence our relationship to the human body? To our own bodies?
THE ARTIST
Mike Hoolboom is one of the most prolific experimental filmmakers of his generation. Born in Toronto in 1959, he has made over 50 films and videos since 1980. He has been awarded numerous prizes for his work and, on two occasions, took home the Toronto Film Festival’s Best Short Canadian Feature Prize for Frank’s Cock (1993) and Letters From Home (1996). Originally adopting structuralist approach that questioned the various specificities of the cinematographic medium, Hoolboom subsequently turned toward a more narrative style of work in the vein of the film essay or personal journal. A characteristic aspect of his work is its appropriation of images from a variety of sources, such as Hollywood films, documentaries and home movies. Hoolboom transforms and updates these sequences by integrating them into intimate narratives concerned with the resonance of the cinematographic image, death, childhood, the body and memory. Hoolboom’s work as a critic has also contributed to his stature as a key figure on the Canadian experimental film scene. He has published two books and over a hundred articles on experimental film, in addition to being the co-founder of Pleasure Dome, a collective of filmmakers dedicated to the promotion of experimental film.
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
COLE, Janis, “From Frank’s Cock to Imitations of Life: The Years with Mike Hoolboom”, Point of View, pp. 22-25.
spectrumtoronto.com
DAVIES, Jon, “Mike Hoolboom and the Invisible Man. Gallery Review : The Iconic Canadian Filmmaker’s First-Ever Solo Public Gallery Show”, Synoptique, no. 8, mars 2005.
synoptique.ca
HOOLBOOM, Mike, Inside the Pleasure Dome : Fringe Film in Canada, Toronto, Coach House Press, 2001.
HOOLBOOM, Mike, Plague Years : A Life in Underground Movies, Toronto, YYZ Books, 1998.
MCBRIDE, Jason, “Mike Hoolboom“, Canadian Film Encyclopedia, janvier 2003. filmreferencelibrary.ca
MONK, Philip, Birth to Cinema: Mike Hoolboom’s Invisible Man
Text accompanying the exhibition.
RUSHOLME, Jack, “ How to Die : The Films of Mike Hoolboom“, MESH, no 4, printemps 1995. experimenta.org
SUNSHINE, Fannie, “Darker side of invisible”, The Weekender, November 28, 2004.
Video Data Bank, “Mike Hoolboom”.
vdb.org