Launch | Mike Hoolboom

Practical Dreamers Launch
October 18, 2008
Videographe, Montreal

Could we start like this? Please imagine that beside me there are a small group of people, three or four or more, they might be Miracles or Supremes or Temptations, but they’re not singers, they’re not a pop group or anything, instead they’re like a version of my conscience which has taken shape outside of me, you know the way that hands turn into shovels, or feet into automobiles. Marina wrote me yesterday and said that she was disappearing, that we are all disappearing, and this group, this grouping, as you can see has taken this to heart. Like me, like you, it seems they’re always busy disappearing.

But not before they’ve swallowed every kind of happiness, every kind of heartbreak, every kind of good-bye, and every way we have of saying yes, in short they have absorbed the sum of all experience and their genius is that they’ve been able to boil all of that down into two simple expressions. They remind me over and over that all that talking and wanting and hoping just boils down to these two easy lines and the first one goes like this: mmmmm, and all the rest of what we’re too afraid to do it sounds like this: ahhhh. So as we’re speaking tonight I hope you can hear, right along with me, this chorus of supreme miracle temptations keeping it all live.

Thank you thank you thank you. It looks like I’m saying something else but I’m only saying thank you. I’m going to say some thank yous and some names and then we’ll watch some movies. Thanks first of all to Videographe for putting on this launch.

None of this would be possible without Evan Munday for working hard to organize this event, he’s also provided the music for tonight (and is it just me, but every song seems to have the word dreamers in its title.) Great thanks to Christina who begins every day facing an endless horizon of detail and then patiently and methodically tends to every part with the same care. And my thanks most of all to the person who made the book better in every way, who has turned the book’s conversations into something that more closely resembles the English language, for reading and reading and reading it again, tireless in her pursuit, and who has also in the spare time she gave up one year for lent, also designed the book. Her expert judgment even after days became nights and weeks turned into weekends ensured that I would only have to say sure, or that looks great or absolutely yes. This project is greatly indebted to Alana Wilcox.

Finally I would like to thank the artists who are in the book, most of this volume came together as an email exchange which occurred over weeks or more often months. Mmmm. Aaah. You can imagine the correspondence yourself. The smallest interview in the book is 8,000 words and the largest twice that.

How I loved listening to your secrets, the small things which gave you pleasure when the large ones ran dry, the stories about the first time and the last time and the next time, and the way your movies granted me the strength to give in, and let go, and at last surrender to your dream of a different kind of cinema, and a different kind of seeing. You were all along quietly and without fanfare working on movies which never really ended, which somehow stuck to anyone who watched them, or who had learned to watch them, until we found ourselves living at last inside a movie which had created a slightly larger, kinder and more generous version of ourselves.

And you allowed me to live out my fantasy of becoming every member of the family, often at the same time. I got to be the father who lays down the law, the spurned and rejected son (oh please, oh please write me back), the faithful mother, the abandoned daughter. You’ve allowed me to become close, and play every part, and then to leave. One day leaving will not be the most satisfying part of my fantasy life, but until then my thanks because you were never afraid to show us the wounds where pictures come from, and every time you did, it made us stronger.

Monique Moumblow
If she hadn’t told me herself I wouldn’t have believed it. She’s a mother now and she has twins. Twins. No, c’mon it couldn’t be, not Monique Moumblow, the maestro of doubling and disappearance, who had already conjured for herself a doppelganger named Anne Russell back when the very first dreams of art were busy staging themselves. Could I also? Is there a place for me in there? Might I also be an artist? In so much of her work she draws her pictures and sounds around the possibility, the chance, of an identity. I think of her work as a series of silhouettes chalked on a bedroom wall or a street corner. Monique would you come on up here for a moment?

Monique, the first question I would like to ask you, if you don’t mind, is about your twins. There was a question of naming as I remember, another central theme in your work, and I’m wondering if you could talk about that?

Do you see your work differently, or the role of an artist differently, now that you’re a mother?

In Having Coffee With No One, you show us a series of empty tables in Paris cafes, in Joan and Stephen , you appear in a series of close-ups talking about an imaginary boy, in Three Waltzes each of its three sections has footnotes in the form of text screens, one reads: “When I go to a party no one remembers I’m there.” And in Kevin your parents speak about their incorrigible son, though we see only pictures of you. Absence and displacement: two old friends it seems. The movie we’re about to see is five and a half minutes long and was made in 2000. It’s called Sleeping Car , can you tell us something about it?

Donigan Cumming
What I like to do most is curl up in a chair and listen while some outrageously smartbomb personality inveighs against the latest incursion by the American empire. I want to hear Robert Fisk tell us all about the Israeli cluster bombing of Lebanon, or Seymour Hersch dishing about the CIA’s secret torture prisons in Afghanistan. I like my politics clean and far away so I can be filled with outrage and then get on with my day. Donigan Cumming doesn’t share my sympathies. He enacts his politics with a camera which can’t get close enough. I am surprised he hasn’t invested in those microcams that surgeons use to illuminate the hidden cavities and organs and blood flows. Instead he holds his camera right up into his subject’s face, here, go ahead, what do you think about this? And he’s not shrinking away behind some façade of neutrality, forget about it, these faces pressed up close to the camera glass talk right back to him, and tell him what a softheaded know nothing he is. Or else he is muttering to himself “under his breath” as the saying goes, in the manic whisper which is part of an interior/exterior monologue which runs through so much of his work.

What does he see?

He is drawn to an invisible underclass, the old drinkers, the rooming house recluses and gap toothed smokers. He is undertaking a kind of urban ethnography, but he does it close and personal, he’s the one racing to the hospital to get required medications, or offering another concerned question. He is part of this sad, broken picture but he never stoops to pity or easy chair emotions which come from far away. He works on the front line of a class war and his tapes are part of the cost and scar and symptom of that war. How many more friends will have to be buried and cherished? In this kind of cinema, in this kind of living: until death do us part.

Donigan, you are engaged in political work, which is not the everything of what you are doing, but it’s part of it. Most of the time your work is shown in galleries of festivals or specialized presentations, doesn’t that neutralize the work and make it safe again, aren’t you singing to the choir?

We’re going to watch a three minute movie you made ten years ago called Karaoke . It’s shot very close up, refusing the surroundings, the room, the context. Why conjure this universe of a body, this landscape of flesh? Who is this man, and why is the tape called Karaoke , (after all, he never utters a word, nor do you)?

Nelson Henricks
All around him the video artists were turning the machines on and letting them run. It seemed, especially at the beginning, that this was enough, never mind about technical questions, or the unspoken grail of the light, the way light passes into the world, offering the sudden illumination of a face, the way her hands are holding that cup means that everything is impossible now, a familiar gesture grown strange and hence at last visible under this rare new light. Yes, all around him they were saying never mind about any of that, we’re artists, let it be raw and video and uncut but then Nelson Henricks came and worried about beauty, an old fashioned word I know, but one which may be heard again in hushed whispers in the closed open doors of Chelsea soirees where the money hovers to make careers possible. Nelson is part of the second generation of Canadian video artists. The mothers and fathers have turned their cameras on the ghosts of their performing selves, and now their children have come to make beautiful pictures, grieving some originary loss, hybrids, hip to the pioneers but not stuck in their mud, carrying it further, going on. Ladies and gentlemen, Nelson Henricks.

Nelson, I’d like to do something cruel and unfair and hope for your forgiveness, I’m going to quote you from your own interview. “I remember walking into a group exhibition in Rome in the summer of 2004 and seeing so much poorly installed, conceived, and constructed video work that for two weeks afterwards I was convinced the only option left for me was to move onto another medium. In private I wonder: am I an anachronism? Is my failure to love this glut of badly crafted, ill-conceived work just a failure to keep up with the times? I think we all need to ask ourselves these questions. Has the medium reached its endgame?” So tell me, tell us all, are we at the end?

The movie we’re going to see is called Time Passes , it was made ten years ago, and it’s 6 1/2 minutes long. It’s part of a trilogy of works, and I’m wondering if you could briefly describe the other two.

In Time Passes we read this line: “They write in order to disappear.” Could you comment?

Practical Dreamers Launch
February 20, 2009
Winnipeg Cinematheque

Could we start like this? Please imagine that beside me there are a small group of people, three or four or more, they might be Miracles or Supremes or Temptations, but they’re not singers, they’re not a pop group or anything, instead they’re like a version of my conscience which has taken shape outside of me, you know the way that hands turn into shovels, or feet into automobiles. You might imagine them not swaying or shaking in perfect rhythm in purple suits, but here in Winnipeg, no, they would be melting, slowly melting here, like all of us they are slowly disappearing.

But not before they’ve swallowed every kind of happiness, every kind of heartbreak, every kind of good-bye, and every way we have of saying yes. In short, this group of three or four, have absorbed the sum of all experience and their genius is that they’ve been able to boil all of that down into two simple expressions. They remind me over and over that all that talking and wanting and hoping just boils down to these two easy lines and the first one goes like this: mmmmm, and all the rest of what we’re too afraid to do it sounds like this: ahhhh. So as we’re speaking tonight I hope you can hear, right along with me, this chorus of supreme miracle temptations keeping it all live.

Thank you thank you thank you. It might look like I’m saying something else but I’m only saying thank you. I’m going to say some thank yous and some names and then we’ll watch some movies. Thanks first of all to Dave Barber for the invitation to come, for caring so much about details so small that no one notices them at all until they stop everything from working. Whenever I think of Dave I can’t help but be reminded of that famous essay by Camus about the wily Greek king who is forced to pushes a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll down again, but in a crucial twist to the story Camus insists that before Sisphyus comes back down again he decides , he makes a decision, each and every time, and then he makes the turn and walks back down again.

The boulder that Sisyphus pushes up the hill of course is you and me and this, all this, and the small large dream of another kind of cinema. The last line of Camus’s writing is the most haunting, and I wish it also for Dave: Condemned to roll this rock for eternity, nonetheless, Camus writes, one must imagine Sisypus happy.

I would like to thank the kind stalwarts at Coach House Books, who do so very much with so very little. They are young-old people, meaning they have energy to burn day and night, but they are also dutiful and responsible and talented and kind, and they have made projects like this possible.

I would like to thank the kind folks at McNally Robinson for coming out tonight, for managing somehow to survive the tidal wave of bookstore monopolies which have crushed independent bookstores across the country. My thanks to the Winnipeg Film Group, who are of course legendary, but the people who work there, including Cecilia, the super executive director, knows that legends are built one e-mail, one paper clip, at a time. Thank you.

How I loved listening to your secrets, the small things which gave you pleasure when the large ones ran dry. The stories about the first time and the last time and the next time, and the way your movies granted me the strength to give in, and let go, and at last surrender to your dream of a different kind of movie, and a different kind of seeing. You were all along quietly and without fanfare working on movies which never really ended, which somehow stuck to anyone who watched them, or who had learned to watch them, until we found ourselves living at last inside a movie which had created a slightly larger, kinder and more generous version of ourselves.

Here’s how the evening’s going to run. We’re going to start with a little q and a with local hero Jeff Erbach, Then we’ll watch Jeff’s Under Chad Valley in glorious 35mm. Then I’m going to come back up and give a brief, very brief, introduction to the rest of the program.

Jeff Erbach
I want him to play for my team. I want to offer him his own car, his own studio and assistants, and all the fancy lighting gear he needs to make those large gauge, beautiful pictures he produces. Instead, Jeff Erbach continues to work in a wilderness all his own, not quite an experimentalist, not quite a storytelling machine. Perhaps it is enough that he has produced some of the most visceral, striking pictures on the fringe. They show young boy slaves in metal harnesses, white smocked girls with missing eyes, underground lairs devoted to meat. It is hardly necessary to add that these imaginative flights are grounded in documentary, like all necessary fiction, it is a world he has lived, and then sculpted again out of light, with actors and crews and truckloads of gear. Jeff has an expensive imagination.

In order to show the trials of childhood, or the prison house of adolescence, he has summoned an army of ghouls, reincarnated cadavers and displaced genitalia. Over and over again he presents us with situations which are so far from our understanding that at last we have to say that it is also the mirror. Yes, that’s me. And me again. He refuses to look away, his well lit cinema is a long stare into the grotesque, the misanthropic, the malformed. He shows us, he insists, that we are also these nightmares. He embraces them with tenderness, he searches not for the moment when we are witty and the good humour is dripping from our lips and the lighting softens our creases, no, he is only interested when we are covered in our mistakes, hardly able to speak at all. While my zombie is busy being born again, while parts of my body have issued declarations of independence. The winters are long where he comes from, long enough to nurture this cruel kindness. Ladies and gentlemen, Jeff Erbach.

I first met Jeff through his movie Soft Like Me . It was a title that I thought summarized all of Canadian cinema. Never mind Dark Knights or Titanics, we were more like Soft Like Me . It’s a dark Gothic story about kids set in the middle of the day under bright prairie skies so we can see every moment of hurt and cruelty. The kids are beaten and bound and workslaved and then hung up at the end of every day like any other farm implement. It was so raw for all its big-budget styling looks, and awful and beautiful, and I thought it was about how awful even the finest childhood really is, that helpless tortured time. Can’t you talk to me, can’t you touch me, with a little more kindness? I’ll never get over the way you love me, not when you love me like that. The prison house of childhood, but also something about received wisdoms. Well we’ve always done it like this. What do you mean it hurts. We’ve always put those kind of people in prison. We’ve always been afraid of the terrorists, I mean the communists, I mean the anarchists, the Protestants, the Jews, the Blacks and the Browns.

Jeff, the cinema is a public art, its demonstration model requires the massing of groups of people for simultaneous witness. Your pictures, however, often feature very difficult to look at scenarios, as if you were not so sure about the whole enterprise of showing at all. Can you talk about your relation to the audience when you are dreaming up your movies?

We are going to see Under Chad Valley , a short made in 1998, it’s 8.5 minutes long. Can you give us some factoids about where you shot this, how you achieved this all-meat décor, how long was your shoot, how you went about finding these perfect faces?

There are a pair of couples in this movie, segregated by age and gender, a pair of butchers, and a pair of little girls. I think this movie is really a kind of a essay about the couple, about the things that couples do, consciously or not, about the things that are made uniquely possible when some solitary someone steps over the threshold and says yes, I do, I will, with you. Can you talk a bit about couples and their role in the movie?

(Jeff’s movie plays.)

The next movie we’re going to see is Daniel Barrow’s Black Heart Desire . Daniel is best known, of course, for his overhead projector drawing performances, but this is a early movie made in another style which he names ‘tard art.’ “Tard art,” says Daniel in yesterday’s email, is a horribly offensive joke expression referring to people who purposefully try to draw like a retarded hillbilly – a cultivated naiveté.

Google adds: “Any one of several fashion-forward individuals expressing opinions about visual representation at snooty openings. ‘I went to the opening to take advantage of the open bar, but the art-tards drove me outta Midtown in about 20 minutes.’

Next up we have Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay’s Live To Tell . It is a Madonna remix, in which the artist sings all the parts. It is also, and curiously, a kind of dance video, though the movements are slacker and oh well and I can’t anymore. His one great love had said no, I can’t anymore, and from this wound Benny took up the video camera and poured his feelings into it, where they could be safely contained and controlled, but also shared, and put on display, for us, in a rare stepping back and forth between private and public.

And we’ll close the evening with Richard Fung’s masterpiece Sea in the Blood . It’s 26 minutes long, the longest movie of the program. Richard is one of the most important writers, thinkers and artists in this country. He has been for years at the very heart of debates around race and representation, he made some of the earliest work around AIDS activism, he has weighed in on gay pornography with his wonderful essay Looking for my penis, raveling out the effects of global empires in local details. For twenty years he has reworked the documentary, leavening it with personal insights, bringing his camera inside the home, settling it beside his mother, then his father, and most memorably, in tonight’s movie, his sister Nan and his longtime boyfriend Tim McCaskill. It is a love story on both accounts, but he also manages to do something which I’ve never found the knack, the appetite for, because in the stories I like to tell about myself, I’m always doing the right thing, or trying to. I’m always on the right side of things, in other words, whenever I talk about my past I’m always busy throwing up the smoke screen and making excuses, and rounding off the corners. Turning my documentary into fiction. One of the great brave things Richard manages in this movie, is to sit inside a moment of failure, even all these years later, without apology, without trying to put a better face on it. How much I need these honest pictures, these movies which use light, as Godard would have us do, not to create stars, but to illuminate situations. I hope you enjoy.

Fringe Filmmakers Profiled by Randall King (Winnipeg Free Press Feb. 2009)
Experimental filmmakers are a breed apart. That, in a nutshell, is the thesis of writer Mike Hoolboom, an experimental filmmaker himself, in his book Practical Dreamers: Conversations with Movie Artists , which I being launched tonight with a talk by Hoolboom and screenings of four films by some of his subjects. Hoolboom says the filmmakers profiled tend to be shunted to the fringes of film art because their works are too different from conventional product.

The Toronto-based Hoolboom offers an analogy: “It’s like if you spent your whole life buying chairs from IKEA, from a factory that makes a thousand chairs a week, and then one day you notice there’s a sound coming from your neighbour’s garage and you walk over and see they’re building this unusual thing. You don’t recognize at first what it might be, but eventually you see that it’s also a chair. But it feels and looks so different because it’s coming out his or her hands, and the way they’re living their life and it offers different kinds of comforts and different kinds of pleasures.”

Carrying forth the neighbour analogy, Hoolboom profiles two local artists, Daniel Barrow and Jeffrey Erbach, among the 27 artists profiled in his book. He includes two of their films, Barrow’s Black Heart’s Desire and Erbach’s Under Chad Valley in the program of four films he’ll be screening.

“Both are absolutely singular artists,” says Hoolboom. “Jeff looks like a feature film maker because of his work with large crews and his obsessive concerns about lighting and high-gloss cinematography. And yet his work emerges out of a wound,” Hoolboom says. “It’s about sharing a wound, and that sharing is more important than three-act structures, or driving towards some kind of narrative end.”

Barrow, who frequently animates his works utilizing transparencies and an overhead projector, is also one of a kind, Hoolboom says. Two other films screening tonight are Benny Nemerofsky’s Live to Tell – a cheeky performance piece cued on Madonna’s hit song, and Richard Fung’s Sea in the Blood , a personal doc utilizing the filmmaker’s old home movies. Copies of Hoolboom’s book will be available for sale.

A Practical Dreamer
Canadian author/experimental filmmaker Mike Hoolboom unveils his new book at Cinematheque by Aaron Graham (Uptown Magazine, Feb. 19, 2009)
Prolific Canadian author and experimental director Mike Hoolboom, whose numerous retrospectives have screened everywhere from Switzerland to the Czech Republic, will unleash his new book, Practical Dreamers: Conversations with Movie Artists, at Cinematheque on Feb. 20.

On the following evening, Hoolboom will introduce two of his favourite Canadian films – both rarely screened – as part of an ongoing series entitled Cinema Lounge.

Practical Dreamers sets its sights on underpublicized Canadian fringe media artists, from Winnipeg’s own Jeff Erbach to Kent Monkman, Daniel Barrow, Donigan Cumming, Steve Reinke and Peter Mettler.

Twenty-seven artists in all, Hoolboom, who chose the title after reading an inspired quote from the estimable jack-of-all-arts Man Ray (“The streets are full of admirable craftsman, but so few practical dreamers”), engages all of the creators in one-on-one conversations about what led them down the filmmaking path, and the particulars of committing their idiosyncratic visions to film or video.

Copies of the book will be sold in the lobby and, to supplement the presentation, Hoolboom will screen four short films by directors featured in his book.

Under Chad Valley , directed by Erbach in 1998, is a particularly grisly yet arresting vision about silent butchers, while Black Heart’s Desire , directed by Daniel Barrow in 1995, is an erratic, incisive animated work that captures how Barrow’s illustrated-challenged friends envision him. Rounding out the program are Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay’s Live to Tell (2002) and Richard Fung’s Sea in the Blood (2001), both of which I’ve yet to see.

On Feb. 21, Hoolboom presents View from the Other Side of the Falls (John Price, 2006), a seven-minute short from Toronto that dabbles with the very chemical properties of film, and Up to the South (Jayce Salloum + Wallid Ra’ad, 1992), a 60-minute doc on how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict caused an occupation and resistance in South Lebanon in 1978 and again in 1992.

While the latter sounds slightly more accessible than the other five shorts, don’t let that scare you: all are worth checking out.

In an intriguing essay entitled My Best Friend is Not a Documentary on Hoolboom’s website (www.mikehoolboom.com), the writer classifies fiction and documentary directors as tops and bottoms. Fiction is “for tops,” as it “commands and dictates,” while the documentary director “learns to accept the world as it already is,” in effect, bending over. With both programs over two nights, we couldn’t have better examples of what exactly Hoolboom means.