The Game (excerpt from “Imitations of Life”) 2003

Imitations strains childhood through a history of reproduction, culling pictures from the Lumiéres to the present day in order to find the future in our past. A video in nine parts: In the Future (3 min), Jack (15 min), Last Thoughts (7 min), Portrait (4 min), Secret (2 min), In My Car (5 min), The Game (5.5 min), Scaling (5 min), Imitation of Life (21 min).

“In his films, Mike Hoolboom is working on the construction and deconstruction of memory: Imitations of Life, his essay film in ten parts, is an inspiring combination of fragments of fictitious and authentic (auto)biographies, of found footage, home movies and a lyrical voice over. The video in ten parts is trying to find a future in the past by revisting childhood memories as proposed by Sigmund Freud. This work is part of a series of films and videos dealing with the body, perception, sickness, death and reproduction.” Tip, Berlin