Mike Hoolboom: Work – Edited by Clint Enns

Mike Hoolboom works in the tradition of the untraditional, at the fringes of the movie factory which have slowly turned from DIY gatherings of outsiders and weirdos into a cottage industry. The movies that Hoolboom makes are no-budget resistances, both to their big-budget counterparts and the ideologies they embody. Given that Hoolboom has been producing moving images for over four decades, it shouldn’t be surprising that his impetus for making this type of work has mutated over time. While the subject matter has changed, the spirit of rebellion remains, and the anger and passion that once fuelled his work has been fine-tuned and transformed into a more sophisticated form of political critique.

Hoolboom is a post-Zen Marxist inspired by the writings of Silvia Federici, Mark Fisher, Hito Steyerl, Byung-Chul Han, Christina Sharpe, Naomi Klein, and Paul B. Preciado, among others. He is an avid reader and spends too much time watching and writing about movies. He believes in the commons, that once words and images have entered the public realm they become fair to use and transform. In addition to fair use, he harbours ideals of fairness and believes in volunteer community efforts that celebrate and document local cultures. His artworks are ways to think through and visualize ideas.

He was born in Ontario and in the 80s went to Sheridan College, where he became a member of the Escarpment School, a group of filmmakers who studied under Rick Hancox and Jeffrey Paull and whose members include Carl Brown, Philip Hoffman, Richard Kerr, Gary Popovich, Steve Sanguedolce, Janis Cole, Holly Dale, Marian McMahon, Mike Cartmell, Lorne Marin, and Alan Zweig. Hoolboom was a member of the Funnel, a radical artist-run centre that focused on experimental filmmaking, and in 2017 he released a book about the organization titled Underground: The Untold Story of the Funnel Film Collective. He is one of the founding members of Pleasure Dome and has worked for both the CFMDC and Images Festival.

Hoolboom’s earliest films are formal experiments, attempts to unpack the language of filmmaking and the mechanics of meaning making. They were aimed at complicating the one-way mode of communication presented by corporate media, calling into question notions of passive spectatorship, asking who owns and controls dominant image culture. In 1988, Hoolboom was diagnosed with HIV, marking a shift in focus in his work to themes of sex, death, and living with HIV. The work became more personal and intimate while still maintaining a defiant punk attitude. By the 2000s, Hoolboom had begun to make cinematic portraits of friends, including a biopic of underground filmmaker Tom Chomont and a documentary about animal activist, filmmaker, and collaborator Mark Karbusicky.

His later works are centred around injustices that stem from hypercapitalism, including racial injustice, class inequities, colonial violence, and global imperialism. He has continued to make filmic portraits along with several films about living through the AIDS pandemic into the era of the cocktail. His works continue to deal with viruses, but his conception of the virus has expanded: Capitalism, racism, and imperialism all act as viruses infecting (and affecting) both bodies and minds, with some people more susceptible than others. His portraits have stretched traditional documentary practices and inhabit a more philosophical and poetic space. The work remains infused with a layer of affect borrowed from his stolen images and densely constructed sound designs.

Over the years, Hoolboom has produced many movies—perhaps too many for any one person to track down and watch. Moreover, the films are in an ongoing state of transition, often subject to radical revisions and retouches by the filmmaker. Hoolboom is always grappling with new ideas, thinking through images, creating visuals to carry emotions that are too difficult or complicated to resolve in a single viewing. In this anthology, I have attempted to compile a complete filmography by combing through ancient distribution catalogues and including movies that have been withdrawn and are no longer available, although the elements for some of these early works are available from the archives at the Cinémathèque québécoise. While the sheer mass of this filmography is a testament to Hoolboom’s commitment to his practice, it exists in this form purely as a reference. I provide a more practical guide for navigating Hoolboom’s work in the form of a curated selection titled “Essential Movies.”

In 1998, YYZ released Plague Years, an edited collection of Hoolboom’s scripts, essays, and stories. Since that time, he has edited more than thirty books with writings dedicated to the works of fellow fringe filmmakers, including Jorge Lozano, Alexandra Gelis, Steve Reinke, Frank Cole, Deirdre Logue, Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, Al Razutis, David Rimmer, Dani (Leventhal) ReStack, Mike Cartmell, Ellie Epp, Madi Piller, Christine Lucy Latimer, Rebecca Garrett, Phillip Barker, b.h. Yael, and Birgit Hein. He has also produced two books of interviews with Canadian filmmakers, Inside the Pleasure Dome and Practical Dreamers; a novel, The Steve Machine; and a work of autotheory, You Only Live Twice (cowritten with Chase Joynt).

This is the first monograph of writings dedicated to Hoolboom’s work. It contains a diverse range of texts and essays from scholars, activists, artists, writers, and friends. In the spirit of inclusion, we wanted to showcase as many different voices as possible. The book is constructed around writing that is short and concise. As such, none of the essays are all-encompassing, nor do they act as the final, definitive word. Instead, the book offers an accumulation of glances where details are offered in place of the big picture. If one connects the dots and squints just a little, it is possible to make out a lived practice that is as socially and politically engaged as it is enraged at the wide variety of injustices that the world has to offer.