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.

"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.

'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).

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.

The explosive story of how a stubborn band of independent filmmakers started a film co-operative that became the most highly respected and mythologized film centre in Canada. Tales outlines the tremendous importance and impact of Winnipeg on the national filmmaking scene. Packed with rare archival footage, dynamic film excerpts, and hilarious interviews, this documentary traces the history of the legendary Winnipeg Film Group. We hear candid behind the scenes stories that illuminate the storied rise of acclaimed filmmakers like John Paizs (Crime Wave), Guy Maddin (Tales From The Gimli Hospital, My Winnipeg) Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan (We’re Talking Vulva, Good Citizen, Betty Baker) and Caroline Monnet (Ikwe). Often mired in controversy, the Film Group has been acclaimed at film festivals around the world – attested to by several Toronto film luminaries in the film – for subversive, original filmmaking. This documentary continues that tradition of bold, exuberant work.

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.

'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).

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.

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

“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 lesbian call fall in and out of love while Prime Minister Wayne Gretzky wages a war against secessional Quebec for media money.

Portrait of gay filmmaker and Parkinson's sufferer Tom Chomont.

In the near future, Canada is at war with Quebec, battles are determined by television ratings, and weapons are sponsored by McDonald's and IBM. In the midst of social chaos, a lesbian couple, Barb and Alex, dress themselves in protective masks, gowns and rubber boots to spend a quiet afternoon at the zoo. Barb is gang-raped by soldiers while taking a short cut through a restrictive zone. Fearful of infection, Alex begs her to take an AIDS test. With a world imploding around them, Barb decides to announce her result as the punchline of a comic routine. At first, Alex can't see the joke, but she eventually joins in and engineers an attempt to make love without touching.

In the near future, Canada is at war with Quebec, battles are determined by television ratings, and weapons are sponsored by McDonald's and IBM. In the midst of social chaos, a lesbian couple, Barb and Alex, dress themselves in protective masks, gowns and rubber boots to spend a quiet afternoon at the zoo. Barb is gang-raped by soldiers while taking a short cut through a restrictive zone. Fearful of infection, Alex begs her to take an AIDS test. With a world imploding around them, Barb decides to announce her result as the punchline of a comic routine. At first, Alex can't see the joke, but she eventually joins in and engineers an attempt to make love without touching.

In the near future, Canada is at war with Quebec, battles are determined by television ratings, and weapons are sponsored by McDonald's and IBM. In the midst of social chaos, a lesbian couple, Barb and Alex, dress themselves in protective masks, gowns and rubber boots to spend a quiet afternoon at the zoo. Barb is gang-raped by soldiers while taking a short cut through a restrictive zone. Fearful of infection, Alex begs her to take an AIDS test. With a world imploding around them, Barb decides to announce her result as the punchline of a comic routine. At first, Alex can't see the joke, but she eventually joins in and engineers an attempt to make love without touching.

An overwhelming and luminescent reflection on death, AIDS and living, Letters from Home is a compelling montage of mini-portraits intercut with found footage, home movies, super-8 drama and pixilated imagery.

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?

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.

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 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.

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

An illustrated lecture, with digressive overlays. Remixology meets biopower.

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.

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.

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After a ruinous engagement, the unnamed narrator alights for Palermo in order to take up with his dead Italian friend, Antonio Gramsci. He was the primal scene of Italy’s Communist party, and for his tireless reporting and befriending the working class he was jailed for over a decade. The state would ruin his body but not his analysis of power, which he poured into 20 notebooks. This philosophical travelogue, a nomadology of resistance and digression, searches citizen faces in order to find the origins of culture.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Imitations of life consist of ten chapters, each one of which has an individual intonation and cinematographic style. The chapters: In the Future, Jack, Last Thoughts, Portrait, Secret, In My Car, The Game, Scaling, Imitation of Life, and Rain.

Imitations of life consist of ten chapters, each one of which has an individual intonation and cinematographic style. The chapters: In the Future, Jack, Last Thoughts, Portrait, Secret, In My Car, The Game, Scaling, Imitation of Life, and Rain.

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.

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

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]

An afternoon idyll. How to listen to the language of the lakeshore plants, as they ripple in the mid-afternoon light? The story they have to tell – of collaboration, cooperation, contamination – leaks into their merely human observers. Everyone is a boat. Floating on the larger dream of manufactured consent, all of my friends have become internet addicts, lacking time or sustained attention, ensuring the solitary necessary for neoliberal capital to roll over us. And yet, in the midst of the riptide, there is another calling from the onshore plants, the possibility of opening and resistance.

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.

In his essay on fossil capitalism and the high price of cheap energy, Mike Hoolboom revives New York from the beginning of the last century. The restored footage of busy urban traffic is accompanied by his divergent reflection on cities built primarily for cars, not people. Especially the less privileged.

Shot in the subway during the summer and fall of 2016, each subject appears for a minute, 69 in all, one for each of Toronto’s subway stops. Serial portraits in black and white.

Shot in the subway during the summer and fall of 2016, each subject appears for a minute, 69 in all, one for each of Toronto’s subway stops. Serial portraits in black and white.

"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)

"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)

"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)