Canadian avant-garde filmmaker Mike Hoolboom will be next in the Film Department’s The Independents series March 16, at 7pm, in the Nat Taylor Cinema, North Ross 102.
Hoolboom is considered one of the finest experimental filmmakers of his generation and a leader in the Canadian avant-garde film community.
Right: Scene from Public Lighting
He will present and discuss Public Lighting, his film about the current media obsession with biography, named best experimental film at the 2004 Santa Cruz Film Festival. Claiming there are only six variations on personality, Hoolboom examines the inner lives of six individuals who reflect these variations. He uses his trademark magic-experimental style, in which the lines between documentary and fiction become increasingly blurred. Life, in Hoolboom’s estimation, is an overlapping of images and sounds, ideas, thoughts and feelings.
What the critics say
“Few filmmakers use re-appropriated footage in such an emotive way: at once humorous and incisive, these chains of images inevitably lead us back to parts of ourselves. Hoolboom’s recent work is in profound sympathy with the human condition that speaks directly to our hearts,” writes Mark Webber of the London Film Festival.
Left: Scene from Public Lighting
“Recalling the multi-partite structure of such earlier work as Panic Bodies, Mike Hoolboom’s latest experimental offering is a tale told in seven discrete yet interrelated chapters. Meditative and disarming, Public Lighting takes a melancholy look at the cult of personality, one that is created, aided and abetted by media technologies, most notably, by the camera,” writes Diane Burgess, Canadian Images programmer at the Vancouver International Film Festival.
About Mike Hoolboom
Hoolboom is a Canadian artist working in film and video. He has won more than 30 international prizes, exhibiting his work in major festivals including Berlin, Rotterdam, Locarno and Nyon, and has had retrospectives in eight European cities. He is a founding member of the Pleasure Dome screening collective and has served as artistic director of the Images Festival and as experimental film coordinator at Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. Hoolbloom has also written two books on experimental cinema (Plague Years, 1998, and Fringe Film in Canada, 2001), and has edited books on Canadian experimental filmmakers Philip Hoffman and Barbara Sternberg.
Images Festival programmer and filmmaker Chris Kennedy will introduce Hoolboom.
For more information about The Independents, please contact Marcia Orlowsky at ext. 55149 or orlowsky@yorku.ca.
Next in the series
Next up in The Independents series will be Julia Kwan with her Sundance-honoured film, Eve and the Firehorse, April 10.