Experimental film artist Mike Hoolboom, who is of Dutch-Indonesian heritage, used his father's Super 8 camera to shoot much of his early work. In those early works he explored how we make meaning: how language and narrative operate, how physicality determines perception, how film conveys ideas. Often intensely personal, Hoolboom's early films use autobiographical images and recollections to investigate how things are understood. Ingenious and seemingly tireless, Hoolboom created many of his films from leftover, unused and recycled footage from his other movies.
Hoolboom's work in the late 1990s confronted problems of perception in our mass culture, which is saturated with images. Works such as Shooting Blanks (1995), Dear Madonna (1996) and In My Car (1998) contain stolen images from music videos, Hollywood blockbusters, European art cinema and commercial television. Hoolboom changed their meaning and asked his audience to question their presence in our individual and collective consciousness.
Panic Bodies (1998), an anthology of short films, is a confrontation with AIDS. It played to critical acclaim at various international film festivals. In 2002, Hoolboom completed a daring feature-length biography of New York experimental filmmaker Tom Chomont, entitled Tom, which premiered at the 2002 Berlin International Film Festival.
Hoolboom’s Work as an Author
In addition to his film work, Hoolboom is also a writer. In 1997 he published Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film in Canada, a collection of interviews with Canadian experimental filmmakers, which was re-released with additional interviews in 2001. He published a second collection of interviews, Practical Dreamers: Conversations with Media Artists, in 2008. Plague Years: A Life in Underground Movies (1998) is a personal memoir and meditation on cinema, media and desire. His first novel, The Steve Machine, was published in the fall of 2008.
Mike Hoolboom’s work has appeared in more than 400 festivals and won 30 awards, including the Tom Berner Award for community service and two lifetime achievement awards, the first from the city of Toronto, and the second from the Mediawave Festival in Hungary.
Learn more:
Mike Hoolboom in The Canadian Encyclopedia
Mike Hoolboom