Program 3: Books of Blood
Mike Hoolboom
Sunday, 8 June, 22.00h, Cinema
IN THE DARK
video / 00:08:00 / Canada / 2003
A meditation on silence, birth and the Canadian cinema, sealed with a kiss.
FRANK’S COCK
16mm / 00:08:00 / Canada / 1993
An elegy for the departed Frank who died of AIDS. Its strength rests in the emotional and soul-bearing delivery of memories from his lover Callum Rennie. As the film proceeds the monologue intensifies, the screen splits and the images become more explicit.
MODERN TIMES
16mm / 00:04:00 / Canada / 1991
Modern Times is a little essay on what happens to the human body when it meets a movie camera.
RED SHIFT
16mm / 00:02:00 / Canada / 1991
Mike Hoolboom’s Red Shift asks the question: how much can you say in two minutes about language, translation and living at the end of the century? The answer, of course, is everything.
IN THE CINEMA
16mm / 00:01:00 / Canada / 1992
The main character in this film is the title delivered in a long sequence of intertitles: “In the cinema no one speaks unless they have something to say, while in real life it’s just the opposite.” After the titles, a man answers a tele- phone and says the same thing. A film about naming, actors and paternity.
DEAR MADONNA
16mm / 00:05:00 / Canada / 1996
While we see Madonna being worshipped and exercising power over slick and handsome men in a fashionable clip, singing “Express yourself”, the lower part of the screen is occupied by a passing text of modest design. It appears to be a letter from Jason, her fictional humble servant, who, in his limitless admiration (there was no life before Madonna), takes the singers themes a step further: power, sadomasochism, eroticism and sexual desire are reflected upon in blunt language.
JOCK
video / 00:17:00 / Canada / 2003
In photography the act of looking is also the act of shooting. A girl on a beach, naked, her only company the photographer. WHAT choice does she have except to swallow these images, to become what he beheld ?
LETTERS FROM HOME
16mm / 00:15:00 / Canada / 1996
Letters From Home is an impassioned investigation of the politics of disease.