Take back your TV
Celebrated Canadian filmmaker on intellectual property, AIDS and why he thought the film world was ‘a place he didn’t belong’
by Arshad Khan
(Top and middle) Stills from Mike Hoolboom’s 2002 film Tom, which he says he’ll be revamping before screening it at Concordia. (Bottom) Hoolboom behind the camera.
Mike Hoolboom takes image appropriation to another level. In an age of increasing corporate control of media, the Canadian experimental filmmaker makes waves and encourages young artists to take back their right to rip, burn, appropriate and recreate.
This year’s Festival du Nouveau Cinéma marked the premiere of Hoolboom’s newest film, Mark, a tribute to his longtime friend and editor Mark Karbusicky. It also follows Karbusicky’s life partner and transsexual extraordinaire Mirha-Soleil Ross, a powerful spoken word and video artist in her own
right.
Hoolboom comes to Concordia Dec. 12. The Link caught up with him in Toronto.
The Link: What inspired you to go into writing and then filmmaking?
Mike Hoolboom: I was always supposed to be a writer, but then I made a wrong turn. Filmmaking was a place I didn’t belong and I arrived without any useful talents or inclinations. It was a world filled with men who could fix things, who could touch the world with their hands and make it sing again. Deep machinery interface. Not to mention [it’s] expensive. But it promised an escape from a life I never had and this proved too seductive to refuse. For many years I watched while my comrades produced one shining masterpiece after another while I flailed around in the dark, making small, unintelligible murmurs. But I had this great advantage: I never expected to get anywhere. So I kept throwing myself into it, and eventually… many years later, the work improved.
What gave you the idea of ripping images and music and appropriating them for your art practice?
Picture theft used to be the exclusive preserve of forgers or empire states looting vanquished territories. But today everyone is busy downloading. This is all perfectly illegal and perfectly necessary. The “interbeing” of digital media is part of its nature, digital gravity leads one to steal again and again in a weightless accumulation.
Tweets, downloading and Facebook may all be expressions of a new form of digital subjectivity: everyone can see who I am all the time. What is being left behind is the old picture of ourselves, which might have looked very much like a book: a finite self, and one which opens and closes. A self with secrets revealed over time. The dark continent of the unconscious, for instance. The digital self, on the other hand, privileges simultaneity, its dominant picture shows itself as a web where everything is available instantly and at the same time.
How do you feel about image ownership laws or other intellectual property restrictions? Does it ever discourage you?
Copyright laws are excellent for corporations, but less than optimal for individuals. At the [Festival du Nouveau Cinéma], Rick Prelinger, the justly celebrated American archivist, [revealed] that he has uploaded more than 4,000 movies and made them available for public use. This is a gesture towards a digital commons. Imagine YouTube filled not only with sentimental pop effluvia, but network archives of the “secret” war in Cambodia (which led to the Pol Pot government and ensuing massacres), or the thousands of photographs of prisoner torture at Guantanamo Bay which have been ordered to be released by federal courts, but which are being withheld for the usual reasons. We need these pictures, they belong to us, and not to corporations or to governments. We need them to understand who we are and what the government is doing in our name.
Would you like to tell our readers about your personal struggle with HIV/AIDS?
It feels an indulgence to speak about my personal struggle when 25 million have already died of AIDS, and so many because they weren’t fortunate enough to have been born here in Canada. What I continue to be amazed by is the sexual desert of so many couples, and on the other hand, the epidemic of unsafe sex. As if the contagion wasn’t happening here, not on my street, not in my bed, never. People under 25 account for more than half of all new HIV infections. How busy we are snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. A little latex between friends, is it too much to imagine?
Tell us about what you will be presenting at Concordia.
I’m going to undertake an act of ventriloquism, passing along the thoughts of Swiss film festival director and philosopher king Jean Perret. He insists that there are just two kinds of memory and two kinds of filmmakers. He whispered to me the difference between mysteries and secrets. And there are four things this professional watcher looks for whenever he sees a film. Then I’ll show André, a 10-minute biographical fragment that is part of my next project, a feature length look (in six parts) at artists who died young.
Tomorrow I hope to finish recutting the portrait of my friend Tom, “finished” seven years ago. It has won prizes and travelled the world, even shown on [Franco-German TV network] Arte. But after tomorrow it will be shorter, tighter and sexier than ever. A deluge of pictures. I’d like to premiere this new/old movie at Concordia.
Mike Hoolboom will be offering a film master class at de Sève Cinema (LB building, 1400 de Maisonneuve Blvd. W.) Dec. 12 at 2 p.m.
The Link Volume 31 Issue 01