Director
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.
Director
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.
Director
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.
Director
“After the death of my mother, I began a suite of women superstar portraits. They were scientists, poets and activists, a second family busy inventing new forms of relationship, even of social organisation. From alternative rockers to radical ecologists, their stories narrate a feminist overturning and resistance, swapping old he-roes for ecosystems and collectives.” Mike Hoolboom
Director
Over a sea of bodies, ruminations float by on markets, class and precarity. The problem of work. How do we survive our own death?
Director
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.
Director
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.
Director
The amazement of people as recorded in early films is the central motif of the film appropriated from the Lumiere brothers’ collections which was shot around 1900 in London, restored, and coloured by artificial intelligence. It also offers a reflection on the regimes of power in which the filming apparatus seizes control over the observed reality.
Director
Vancouver composer and sound ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp was the only woman to participate in the original version of the World Soundscape project that not only brought new ears to city life, but laid the foundation for noise bylaws/pollution standards, radically upending traditional notions of music and the role of the composer. Hildegard has brought the art of sound walking to groups around the world, and she has formulated a deep feminist ecology rooted in the body. The film offers a place for the viewer to listen, the necessary precondition for personal and societal change.
Director
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.
Director
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.
Director
Director
One of my father's favourite expressions, mostly passed away now: for the birds. Meaning: that was nothing. In this aviary anthology, the narrator describes a post-art life that leads, inexorably, to the nature of nature.
Director
Short by Mike Hoolboom.
Director
An ice cream factory worker reflects on AIDS and the new capitalism. "A move from a regime of cultural production ordered by authorship, originality and signature to one ordered by the brand, branding and simulation." This short essay doc is indebted to deep digs by Emily Martin, Lisa Adkins and Karen Ho.
Screenplay
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.
Director
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.
Director
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.
Director
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
Director
Based on texts gleaned from Catherine Bush’s novel Blaze Island, this multi-layered collage offers a fleeting love story on a distant shore. The novel reimagines Shakespeare’s last testament, The Tempest, now set on a fictionalized version of Fogo Island, a windswept island off Canada’s east coast. Local photographers/artists Paddy Barry and M’Liz Keefe issue a lifetime of photographs and deep weather sightings, which create a kind of ground and schooling for the couple (Miranda and Frank), who find themselves by embracing the climate.
Producer
Director
Director
In a series of simple frames, the often misunderstood practice of Zen takes shape as basketball bliss. Now in retirement, the greatest defensive player of the amateur leagues continues to practice on a remote island, far from the madding crowds. His techniques and dedication undergo continual refinement, revealed here in this startling exposé.
Director
The movie’s prelude visits Lenin’s home town of Ulyanovsk during Victory Day, the annual commemoration of WW2’s end, in an increasingly militarized spectacle of children and guns and then moves to anti-capitalist gestures in Strasbourg (France) where DIY collectives create new forms of contact and resistance. With help from Simone de Beauvoir, Oscar Wilde and Celine Callot.
Director
A bio-doc about my pal Judy Rebick: iconic second wave Canadian feminist, radical activist, journalist and writer. She is the founding publisher of rabble.ca, Canada’s irreverent progressive online news source, and a former president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, Canada’s largest women’s group. Shot in kinetic bursts of super 8, the only voice is Judy’s, impelling a trek through a devastated family, the struggle for women’s right to choose and the challenge of neo-liberalism. A series of six public moments (marked by speeches and TV spots) structure a life collage that arrives in six movements. A fractured movie for fractured times.
Director
In a number of interlocking episodes, five women weigh in on growing up in capitalism. Poetries of survival are interwoven with an adaptation of Mary Oliver’s iconic poem Wild Geese.
Director
An illustrated lecture, with digressive overlays. Remixology meets biopower.
Director
"Compilation" of five previous works of the director - Leaving Church, Damaged, 27 Thoughts About My Dad, Rain, Buffalo Death Mask - Father Auditions is a prism that reflects different images and at the same time, in the assembly of the distinguished short films, contemplates a single figure - that of the father - as lack, ghost of the past, enigma to which it was not possible to find an answer.
Sound Designer
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.
Editor
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.
Cinematography
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.
Producer
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.
Director
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.
Director
A meditation in two parts. The traveller lays up a set of headphones and tranforms his tropical setting into a concert stage, listening to an acoustic cover of the Stooges’ hit which gives this movie its title, the one ranked 438 on Rolling Stone magazine’s 500 best of all time. A palm tree-gilded road in rural Cuba is the setting for a meditation on a dog’s life. Traffic flows accommodate the uneasy terrain, the fellow travellers, as if we were all in this together. After Iggy Pop, the balm of Adorno.
Director
In a suite of interviews for his “second first feature” Godard submitted to the slings and arrows of North American media interrogators with polite hostility and a bristling intelligence. Here, the briefest chitchat is rendered in eight parts, which sees the maestro declaim on spectacle, memory, interpretation and being. While the impossibility of a talk show becomes a laughing matter, frozen moments occur in the aftermath in eight brief haikus.
Director
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?
Director
The heart of the matter is friend and mentor Mike Cartmell in an outtake from Alan Zweig’s Vinyl (2000). Mike insists that listening deeply to music, the music of Coleman Hawkins for example, is an authentic relationship, equal to human company. The movie closes with Hawkins playing one of his signature tunes, the jazz standard Lover Man, along with Cozy Cole (drums), Barry Galbrath (guitar), Johnny Guaneri (piano) and Milt Hinton (bass). The midsection is occupied by an outdoors swimming pool, along with a voice-over extolling the virtues of frustration.
Director
A detourned love poem by Ocean Vuong remixed for Palestine. The root of it all is a calling, a voice, which is followed through Gaza markets and tunnels until the cause of liberation can be seen clearly and embraced. Why do birds suddenly appear?
Director
When he won his Giller Award, Saint Lucia poet/playwright Derek Walcott couldn’t make it, so Michael Ondaatje stood in his place and read Love After Love, the most beautiful poem I had ever heard. It remains a haunting and a promise. I learned it “by heart,” as the saying goes, and finally made this movie, which is only a way of keeping it with me as memento and keepsake. Using subtle repeats and rest stops for reflection, the poem’s fifteen lines are a narration of self-care, an invitation to do the deep dig of meeting that most unwanted of all visitors. The film is framed by a writer/stand-in who is in search, waiting in the pause between faces. Her writing brings her to a temporary oasis where she can reboot and refresh, invite her many personalities to arrive, and allow old encounters with friends and familiars to flow through her, to become again a living memory.
Director
Unable to leave my apartment universe and attend the Alchemy Film and Moving Image Fest in Scotland, I sent along this digital stand-in instead, composed and commissioned as an introduction to Aftermath, a four-part, feature-length found footage bio-pic. Direct camera address is overlaid with in and outtakes from my movie archive. Inspirations from Audre Lorde and my brilliant friend theorist Laura Marks who explained her mirror-touch synaesthesia.
Writer
Set in a Red Cross rehab centre in Vietnam, victims of the American war learn to walk on new prosthetic legs. The mystical faiths of destruction and providing assistance. Made during a Geneva workshop, using the archives of the Red Cross.
Sound
Set in a Red Cross rehab centre in Vietnam, victims of the American war learn to walk on new prosthetic legs. The mystical faiths of destruction and providing assistance. Made during a Geneva workshop, using the archives of the Red Cross.
Editor
Set in a Red Cross rehab centre in Vietnam, victims of the American war learn to walk on new prosthetic legs. The mystical faiths of destruction and providing assistance. Made during a Geneva workshop, using the archives of the Red Cross.
Director
Set in a Red Cross rehab centre in Vietnam, victims of the American war learn to walk on new prosthetic legs. The mystical faiths of destruction and providing assistance. Made during a Geneva workshop, using the archives of the Red Cross.
Producer
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.
Sound
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.
Director
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.
Director
This miniature presents an extensive reflection on ways of watching, reception and rebellion against indoctrination and control. Making decisions about life choices serves as a parallel to ways of watching, interpretation and experience which may even lead to forgetting one’s own body.
Sound
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.
Editor
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.
Director
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.
Cinematography
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.
Sound
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.
Editor
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.
Producer
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.
Director
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.
Director
Made at the international film school in Cuba (EICTV) at the start of the rainy season. A tender re-examination of bodies from the first generation of Artificial Intelligence robots programmed with a full range of emotions. Electronic revolt and resistance. Secret messages encoded within robot diary fragments offer possible futures for post-human societies.
Director
A four-part bio-pic that narrates moments from the lives of Fats Waller, Jackson Pollock, Janieta Eyre and Frida Khalo. This quartet of hauntologies reframes the cruel reductions of biography to focus on death and doubles. Repurposing archival texts (the diaries of Khalo, the testimonies of Waller’s kin and familiars) as audiovisual graffiti, old voices are cropped and replayed as intertitles or voice-over fragments, lending a historic charge to images that dream across the present.
Director
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.
Sound
Based on Lisa Robertson’s The Nilling, the movie offers poetry as antidote to the exclusions of state and identity.
Producer
Based on Lisa Robertson’s The Nilling, the movie offers poetry as antidote to the exclusions of state and identity.
Editor
Based on Lisa Robertson’s The Nilling, the movie offers poetry as antidote to the exclusions of state and identity.
Cinematography
Based on Lisa Robertson’s The Nilling, the movie offers poetry as antidote to the exclusions of state and identity.
Director
Based on Lisa Robertson’s The Nilling, the movie offers poetry as antidote to the exclusions of state and identity.
Writer
How to say good-bye to friends? How to keep from becoming a ghost in the old streets of the Czech Republic, at once too strange and familiar? Let’s step inside the old scenes of love (which are also the prelude to love’s betrayal) before animal rescue can offer consolations. Shot on the closing night of the Jihlava Festival in 2016, in the Dukla Theatre, on the festival’s twentieth anniversary, where the namesake of its experimental offerings was being offered another airing, and the three of us were gathered there to bear witness, each hello already a prelude to departure.
Sound
How to say good-bye to friends? How to keep from becoming a ghost in the old streets of the Czech Republic, at once too strange and familiar? Let’s step inside the old scenes of love (which are also the prelude to love’s betrayal) before animal rescue can offer consolations. Shot on the closing night of the Jihlava Festival in 2016, in the Dukla Theatre, on the festival’s twentieth anniversary, where the namesake of its experimental offerings was being offered another airing, and the three of us were gathered there to bear witness, each hello already a prelude to departure.
Editor
How to say good-bye to friends? How to keep from becoming a ghost in the old streets of the Czech Republic, at once too strange and familiar? Let’s step inside the old scenes of love (which are also the prelude to love’s betrayal) before animal rescue can offer consolations. Shot on the closing night of the Jihlava Festival in 2016, in the Dukla Theatre, on the festival’s twentieth anniversary, where the namesake of its experimental offerings was being offered another airing, and the three of us were gathered there to bear witness, each hello already a prelude to departure.
Cinematography
How to say good-bye to friends? How to keep from becoming a ghost in the old streets of the Czech Republic, at once too strange and familiar? Let’s step inside the old scenes of love (which are also the prelude to love’s betrayal) before animal rescue can offer consolations. Shot on the closing night of the Jihlava Festival in 2016, in the Dukla Theatre, on the festival’s twentieth anniversary, where the namesake of its experimental offerings was being offered another airing, and the three of us were gathered there to bear witness, each hello already a prelude to departure.
Producer
How to say good-bye to friends? How to keep from becoming a ghost in the old streets of the Czech Republic, at once too strange and familiar? Let’s step inside the old scenes of love (which are also the prelude to love’s betrayal) before animal rescue can offer consolations. Shot on the closing night of the Jihlava Festival in 2016, in the Dukla Theatre, on the festival’s twentieth anniversary, where the namesake of its experimental offerings was being offered another airing, and the three of us were gathered there to bear witness, each hello already a prelude to departure.
Director
How to say good-bye to friends? How to keep from becoming a ghost in the old streets of the Czech Republic, at once too strange and familiar? Let’s step inside the old scenes of love (which are also the prelude to love’s betrayal) before animal rescue can offer consolations. Shot on the closing night of the Jihlava Festival in 2016, in the Dukla Theatre, on the festival’s twentieth anniversary, where the namesake of its experimental offerings was being offered another airing, and the three of us were gathered there to bear witness, each hello already a prelude to departure.
Himself
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.
Producer
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.
Director
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.
Sound
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.
Editor
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.
Writer
In a Red Cross hospital in Vietnam, the young white nurse tends his wounds. Drawn from the archives of the Red Cross in Geneva.
Sound
In a Red Cross hospital in Vietnam, the young white nurse tends his wounds. Drawn from the archives of the Red Cross in Geneva.
Editor
In a Red Cross hospital in Vietnam, the young white nurse tends his wounds. Drawn from the archives of the Red Cross in Geneva.
Director
In a Red Cross hospital in Vietnam, the young white nurse tends his wounds. Drawn from the archives of the Red Cross in Geneva.
Director
Is it the oldest dream? Giving birth to my father. Shot on a single starry afternoon.
Director
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
Director
Three-part colour inquiry. Questions adapted from Frederick Douglass to Jericho Brown bring the hurt. The images have been soaked in water until everything recognizable has been stripped away, leaving behind a wash of colours, a bacterial flow.
Editor
Shot in the murk and fog of a breakdown. Friends jam, a body lies on the ground, James Baldwin visits his father for the last time. Inspired by Black Lives Matter. Remembering Charlie 'Africa' Keunang. (Mike Hoolboom)
Cinematography
Shot in the murk and fog of a breakdown. Friends jam, a body lies on the ground, James Baldwin visits his father for the last time. Inspired by Black Lives Matter. Remembering Charlie 'Africa' Keunang. (Mike Hoolboom)
Producer
Shot in the murk and fog of a breakdown. Friends jam, a body lies on the ground, James Baldwin visits his father for the last time. Inspired by Black Lives Matter. Remembering Charlie 'Africa' Keunang. (Mike Hoolboom)
Director
Shot in the murk and fog of a breakdown. Friends jam, a body lies on the ground, James Baldwin visits his father for the last time. Inspired by Black Lives Matter. Remembering Charlie 'Africa' Keunang. (Mike Hoolboom)
Producer
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.
Editor
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.
Cinematography
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.
Director
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.
Sound
A reflection on colour in fifteen camera tests.
Editor
A reflection on colour in fifteen camera tests.
Producer
A reflection on colour in fifteen camera tests.
Director
A reflection on colour in fifteen camera tests.
Director
Based on Dogen’s Mountains and Rivers Sutra, written in 13th century Japan. Here are a few words of introduction spoken by the artist. Direct-to-camera address in an alternating light current, an establishing shot of language. How should we begin?
Director
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.
Director
We Make Couples is a master documentary maker's six-years-in-the-making Marxist love story. Crammed full of thoughts on cinema, politics and the pleasures and costs of our collective stabs at happiness, it’s a powerful film challenging us to ask whether 'the couple' could also be a form of resistance. - IFFR
Himself
How can we express the emotional experience of depression and suicide and overcome the stigmas associated with mental health? Sanguedolce’s experimental documentary brings together four artists (including experimental filmmaker Mike Hoolboom), who speak with refreshing honesty about how thoughts of suicide have dominated their personal and creative lives. Shot on 16mm and hand-coloured, the flow of images creates a poetic visual response to the stories presented on the soundtrack and allows space for reflection.
Director
Lensed in Ohio’s Broadview Developmental Center in 1967 by secret camera genius and audio visual healer Jeffrey Paull, Scrapbook tells the story of audacious autistic Donna Washington in her own words, as she encounters pictures of one of her former selves fifty years later.
Sound
A primatologist and sex researcher uncover love as a test case, while weighing in on Palestine, power and bonobos.
Editor
A primatologist and sex researcher uncover love as a test case, while weighing in on Palestine, power and bonobos.
Writer
A primatologist and sex researcher uncover love as a test case, while weighing in on Palestine, power and bonobos.
Producer
A primatologist and sex researcher uncover love as a test case, while weighing in on Palestine, power and bonobos.
Director
A primatologist and sex researcher uncover love as a test case, while weighing in on Palestine, power and bonobos.
Director
A found footage collection of 26 AIDS adverts. Freud uncovered the mysterious connection between language and bodies at the same moment that moving pictures provided new behavior modellings. How do pictures change desire, or the behaviours of desire? This question carried extra weight after the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic, as movie makers struggled to find combinations of pictures that might help create the conditions for safer sex.
Himself
For more than two decades Mike Hoolboom has been one of our foremost artistic witnesses of the plague of the twentieth century, HIV. A personal voice documenting and piercing the clichéd spectrum of Living With AIDS from carnal abjection to incandescent spirituality, no surviving moving image visionary surpasses him. Buffalo Death Mask is a three-part meditation — visual, oral and haptic, both campy and ecstatic — on survival, mourning, memory, love and community. A conversation between Hoolboom and visual artist Stephen Andrews, both long time survivors of the retrovirus, floats over what seems to be a dream of Toronto and some of its ghosts. No one savours the intimations of immortality inherent in recycled footage like Mike, no one else understands how processed Super 8 can answer the question “Why are we still here when so many are gone?"
Director
For more than two decades Mike Hoolboom has been one of our foremost artistic witnesses of the plague of the twentieth century, HIV. A personal voice documenting and piercing the clichéd spectrum of Living With AIDS from carnal abjection to incandescent spirituality, no surviving moving image visionary surpasses him. Buffalo Death Mask is a three-part meditation — visual, oral and haptic, both campy and ecstatic — on survival, mourning, memory, love and community. A conversation between Hoolboom and visual artist Stephen Andrews, both long time survivors of the retrovirus, floats over what seems to be a dream of Toronto and some of its ghosts. No one savours the intimations of immortality inherent in recycled footage like Mike, no one else understands how processed Super 8 can answer the question “Why are we still here when so many are gone?"
Producer
Lacan Palestine is a found footage essay about the troubled couple in Palestine. This country without a country has been party to imperial projections for centuries, amply on display here in waves of armed crusaders, legionnaires, Mongols on horseback and biplanes issuing state edicts from the end of a machine gun. There are maps by the galore, drawn and redrawn as occupied territories are bartered in foreign capitals. Contemporary art activists Velcrow Ripper, Elle Flanders, Tamira Sawatzky, Dani Leventhal and others have generously donated their keen lookings and these have been blended with newsreels, desert spectaculars, historical recreations and intimate encounters. Mike Cartmell appears as the ghost of psychoanalysis, offering ruminations on killing the father, John Coltrane and why enjoyment is difficult
Editor
Lacan Palestine is a found footage essay about the troubled couple in Palestine. This country without a country has been party to imperial projections for centuries, amply on display here in waves of armed crusaders, legionnaires, Mongols on horseback and biplanes issuing state edicts from the end of a machine gun. There are maps by the galore, drawn and redrawn as occupied territories are bartered in foreign capitals. Contemporary art activists Velcrow Ripper, Elle Flanders, Tamira Sawatzky, Dani Leventhal and others have generously donated their keen lookings and these have been blended with newsreels, desert spectaculars, historical recreations and intimate encounters. Mike Cartmell appears as the ghost of psychoanalysis, offering ruminations on killing the father, John Coltrane and why enjoyment is difficult
Cinematography
Lacan Palestine is a found footage essay about the troubled couple in Palestine. This country without a country has been party to imperial projections for centuries, amply on display here in waves of armed crusaders, legionnaires, Mongols on horseback and biplanes issuing state edicts from the end of a machine gun. There are maps by the galore, drawn and redrawn as occupied territories are bartered in foreign capitals. Contemporary art activists Velcrow Ripper, Elle Flanders, Tamira Sawatzky, Dani Leventhal and others have generously donated their keen lookings and these have been blended with newsreels, desert spectaculars, historical recreations and intimate encounters. Mike Cartmell appears as the ghost of psychoanalysis, offering ruminations on killing the father, John Coltrane and why enjoyment is difficult
Sound
Lacan Palestine is a found footage essay about the troubled couple in Palestine. This country without a country has been party to imperial projections for centuries, amply on display here in waves of armed crusaders, legionnaires, Mongols on horseback and biplanes issuing state edicts from the end of a machine gun. There are maps by the galore, drawn and redrawn as occupied territories are bartered in foreign capitals. Contemporary art activists Velcrow Ripper, Elle Flanders, Tamira Sawatzky, Dani Leventhal and others have generously donated their keen lookings and these have been blended with newsreels, desert spectaculars, historical recreations and intimate encounters. Mike Cartmell appears as the ghost of psychoanalysis, offering ruminations on killing the father, John Coltrane and why enjoyment is difficult
Writer
Lacan Palestine is a found footage essay about the troubled couple in Palestine. This country without a country has been party to imperial projections for centuries, amply on display here in waves of armed crusaders, legionnaires, Mongols on horseback and biplanes issuing state edicts from the end of a machine gun. There are maps by the galore, drawn and redrawn as occupied territories are bartered in foreign capitals. Contemporary art activists Velcrow Ripper, Elle Flanders, Tamira Sawatzky, Dani Leventhal and others have generously donated their keen lookings and these have been blended with newsreels, desert spectaculars, historical recreations and intimate encounters. Mike Cartmell appears as the ghost of psychoanalysis, offering ruminations on killing the father, John Coltrane and why enjoyment is difficult
Director
Lacan Palestine is a found footage essay about the troubled couple in Palestine. This country without a country has been party to imperial projections for centuries, amply on display here in waves of armed crusaders, legionnaires, Mongols on horseback and biplanes issuing state edicts from the end of a machine gun. There are maps by the galore, drawn and redrawn as occupied territories are bartered in foreign capitals. Contemporary art activists Velcrow Ripper, Elle Flanders, Tamira Sawatzky, Dani Leventhal and others have generously donated their keen lookings and these have been blended with newsreels, desert spectaculars, historical recreations and intimate encounters. Mike Cartmell appears as the ghost of psychoanalysis, offering ruminations on killing the father, John Coltrane and why enjoyment is difficult
Director
Commissioned for LIFT’s (Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto) 30th anniversary, this brief black and white sojourn finds a father and son wandering, midway upon the journey of their lives, as the saying goes. Vincent Grenier adds slow motion heat to the looking with his first emulsion work in decades. Stale dated film stock courtesy of Gary Popovich. Mike Cartmell takes a nod as the father. Intertitles courtesy of Adam Phillips, hand written by Kika Thorne. To know what one fears is to know what one wants.
Himself
An experimental documentary that takes as its starting point a nineteenth century farmhouse in Southern Ontario, Canada, and asks the question "what has been here before?"
Director
This moving film tells the story of Hoolboom's close friend and collaborator Mark Karbusicky, who unexpectedly committed suicide in 2007. Interviews with Mark's friends and family, as well as his lover, are interwoven with home movies, offering a glimpse into the life of this generous, loving and enigmatic figure. A powerful testimony to the enduring impact of our actions on the lives of others.
Director
“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
Director
'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
Director
Short film by Mike Hoolboom
Director
Short film by Mike Hoolboom
Director
How do we tell the story of a life? What cruel reduction of an image will stand (in the obituary, the family photo album, the memory of friends) for the years between a grave and a difficult birth? Public Lighting examines the current media obsession with biography, offering up “the six different kinds of personality” (the obsessive, the narcissist) as case studies and miniatures, possible examples.
Cinematography
"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)
Producer
"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)
Director
"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)
Screenplay
"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)
Writer
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.
Director
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.
Director
A meditation on birth, silence and the American cinema, sealed with a kiss. A single gesture into light.
Director
The journey of a someone in search of his roots. He is pursued by his childhood self who has already written his own future, and foretells the amnesia which will doom this traveling. Here is a life made of pictures, an allegory and reflection of life inside ‘the society of the spectacle.’
Writer
"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." (Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller)
Director
Portrait of gay filmmaker and Parkinson's sufferer Tom Chomont.
Narrator (voice)
Brasília, the "city of hope", "the ultimate utopia of the 20th century" , is being conserved as a cultural heritage today. It is a place as old as the filmmaker. Segments of amateur footage and of feature films shot on location in the early sixties are inserted in his 1998 travelogue. The utopian city as represented in "Vacancy" is a place abandoned from its inhabitants, a museum kept alive by its staff only.
Director
Scenes from Madonna: Truth or Dare and the music video for Madonna's "Vogue" along with other various videos are spliced together with a letter from a former sexual partner of Madonna's scrolling on the bottom of the screen.
Writer
"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.
Himself
"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.
Director
A retrospective based on an introspective vision, this stream of still pictures, unfolding to the rhythm of the voice-over (delivered by Steve Reinke), portrays a man who visually exposes his psychological “faults.” Recounting eighteen decisive moments in his life, and dissecting both his genetic and cultural heritage, the work delimits a transitory space in which each image crystallizes one of these indistinct marking points. Bringing together a number of collectively shared experiences, Damaged presents a series of significant events — some pleasant, others less so — evincing the complexity of the stages of life and offering models of childhood, sexuality and adulthood that denounce the transmission and acculturation of stigmatized identities. —Karl-Gilbert Murray, FIFA Catalogue
Director
Passing On, a lyrical, typically confessional effort that encapsulates what's preceded it. Hoolboom's dance with death — a motif acknowledged in the medieval woodcut segues between segments — resonates in double-exposed shots of anonymous people simply crossing a square, some of them "real," others shown as faint, literal "ghosts" coexisting with those still in the temporal present. In voiceover Hoolboom talks about the "conspiracy of chromosomes" that make up the human being, but the phrase is ironic; for him, nothing is more real, or human, or felt, than what that conspiracy has created.
Director
A life lived in cars and a last race with the devil...
Director
A monologue about AIDS, rendered in split-screens generously furbished with images from Terminator 2, science flicks, Michael Jackson and home movies. The opening section of Panic Bodies (70 minutes 1998).
Director
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.
(voice)
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. (M.M.)
Director of Photography
“Eternity takes the form of a letter about fighting disease and practicing loss, superimposed over haunting images of old teacups, people in boats and water.” San Francisco International Festival Catalogue, 1999
Editor
“Eternity takes the form of a letter about fighting disease and practicing loss, superimposed over haunting images of old teacups, people in boats and water.” San Francisco International Festival Catalogue, 1999
Director
“Eternity takes the form of a letter about fighting disease and practicing loss, superimposed over haunting images of old teacups, people in boats and water.” San Francisco International Festival Catalogue, 1999
Director
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.
Director
Jason returns with another letter to Madonna, thanking her for letting him be her "mistress".
Director
“Panic Bodies consists of six parts or chapters, varying in length and style. Each suggests a new approach to these returning questions: what does it mean to have a body; to be a body, and what does this body want? Hoolboom appears in the framing chapters, and in between others take his place, submitting their bodies to a probing research. The treatment and effects of AIDS reform these subjects, but also the sexual body with all its desires and questions, and the almost dying body that can temporarily leave the world to be absorbed by what is called ‘the white light’ in Eternity… The fifth chapter is entitled Moucle’s Island and features Vienna avant filmmaker Moucle Blackout. It rhymes her movements with the gestures of a small child, and then projects her into a dreamy sexual reverie.” Esma Moukhtar, Montevideo Catalogue
Director
A hybrid of DeSade and Dali, House of Pain is a nightmare that takes place between sleep and death, where the performers appear as mute hallucinations. The film features a hallucinogenic blend of the domestic and perverse.
"STERNENSCHAUER - SCATTERING STARS is a paean to light, a glittering bodice of a film that rapturously unfolds its subject with a shimmering luminosity.» Mike HOOLBOOM
Director
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.
Director
Hoolboom takes the music video for Madonna's "Justify My Love" and runs it alongside a transgressive letter to Madonna from her schoolmate, Jason.
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.
Sound
A gay man reminisces about his deceased lover.
Camera Operator
A gay man reminisces about his deceased lover.
Editor
A gay man reminisces about his deceased lover.
Writer
A gay man reminisces about his deceased lover.
Director
Originally made in 16mm, as the fourth part of the feature-length wordless psychodrama collection House of Pain. Shiteater is a carefully hewn assault on a society bent on consuming itself, an homage to late capitalist ideals of corporate mergers and the dissolution of perimeters – state borders, regulations and individual privacies are redrawn in the light of oligarchy. Psychodramatic in form, Shiteater features a single protagonist, Vancouver’s performance artist Andrew Wilson. Wilson’s transgressive fin-de-siecle performances have typically joined pop culture icons in onanistic rites of excess and immolation, using the body as the intersection of competing and unbearable pressures.
Director
A lesbian call fall in and out of love while Prime Minister Wayne Gretzky wages a war against secessional Quebec for media money.
Director
A gay man reminisces about his deceased lover.
Director
The cross-country travelogue which is the basis of this film was made in the fourties. Sponsored by the Canadian government, it is pitched towards an American understanding, unfolding the blank geography of its northern neighbour as a playground for the leisure class, its untamed wilds held in check by the relentless survey of the Mounties. Rocky Mountain ski runs, Niagara Falls, rivers teeming with gold dust and plains of buffalo reassure an American audience that geography is destiny.
Director
"In Mexico, experimental filmmakers Hoolboom and Steve Sanguedolce set out to dissect the travel bug. Hoolboom's deadpan, incisive voice-over offers the viewer the air-tight experience of a Third World holiday, while images from an archaeological museum to a bullfight to an auto factory establish the dual contexts of tourism and Free Trade." (Toronto International Festival Catalogue)
Director
The main character is the title.
Director
Made on a sunny afternoon. A last stand of burning light. Shot in 1985, released in 1990 with a soundtrack by Kaiser Nietzsche (John Kamevaar, Thomas Handy), new soundtrack and title in 2016.
Director
BRAND begins like a child's yawn, a fairy tale with an incredible beginning. Brand blends two themes into a fugue of questions and answers. The first theme is a child's play, illuminated here in the flickering shadows of a kindergarten. The second theme shows the red-hot iron that will mark any offspring.
Director
“The cinematic equivalent of flipping the bird, White Museum is an audacious and often hilarious early effort by master provocateur Mike Hoolboom. Viewers must wait about 30 minutes to see the one and only image in the film. In the meantime, Hoolboom expounds on everything from old lovers to making movies to living in the big city. With unabashed irony, he argues for a cinema without images, while simultaneously describing the images he would show if he had the cash. For a film that appears on the surface to be literally about nothing, White Museum becomes a veritable cornucopia of semiotic jokes and meanings, as well as a rich statement on the nature of cinema itself.” –Jason McBride, Canadian Film Encyclopedia
