Filmmaker Mike Hoolboom in person!
Filmforum is honored to welcome Toronto-based artist, writer, curator, poet, thinker, and filmmaker Mike Hoolboom for the Los Angeles premiere of his brand new feature, Incident Reports. (Hoolboom will also be showing a selection of short works at REDCAT on Monday, 9/19.)
Mike Hoolboom has forged a singular artistic and curatorial identity over the past few decades, as his various creative, intellectual, pedagogical, and research practices have overlapped and interwoven, along with the circumstances and experiences of his own life. As a result, encountering Hoolboom's work – whether through his films, his criticism, his curating, his teaching, etc. -- is something akin to experiencing a rich, intricate, and irreducible slice of Hoolboom himself.
Otherwise quite eclectic and unsummarizable, perhaps one common strand in all of Hoolboom's work is the deeply humanist sensibility that informs everything he creates. Hoolboom's work is compassionate, both intellectually rigorous and emotionally dimensional. He spins fascinating webs of interconnectivity between seemingly unrelated notions, events, images, and concepts, and employs an intuitive and expressive mastery of moving image media to explore both the disparity of these filaments at the same time he makes their connections apparent to us. Hoolboom seems driven to explore the immensely multi-planar and irretrievably subjective qualities of memory, awareness, and the experience of human interaction.
Filmforum is thrilled to present the Los Angeles premiere of Mike Hoolboom's latest feature, Incident Reports, in which a measured and poeticized video exploration of Toronto acts as a kind of spiritual prescription for the protagonist's alienation/amnesia in relation to his surroundings.
Notes by Mark Toscano.
Tickets: $10 general, $6 students/seniors; free for Filmforum members. Available in advance from Brown Paper Tickets at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2601933 or at the door.
About Mike Hoolboom:
Born: Korean War, the pill, hydrogen bomb, playboy mansion. 1980s: Film emulsion fetish and diary salvos. Schooling at the Funnel: collective avant-geek cine utopia. 1990s: failed features, transgressive psychodramas, questions of nationalism. 2000s: Seroconversion cyborg (life after death), video conversion: feature-length, found footage bios. Fringe media archaeologist: author of 7 books, editor/co-editor 12 books. Curator: 30 programs (Rotterdam, etc) Copyleft yes. Occasional employments: artistic director Images Fest, fringe distribution Canadian Filmmakers. 80 film/vids, most redacted. 9 features. 30 awards, 12 international retrospectives. 2 lifetime achievement awards. Website: 24 books, 15 mags, 40 interviews, 100+ essays, 40 sound clips.
Mike Hoolboom is a Canadian artist working in film and video. He has made over eighty films and videos, though most have been withdrawn from circulation, approximately a dozen remain on view. His work has appeared in over four hundred festivals, garnering thirty awards. He has been granted 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.
He has enjoyed retrospectives of his work at the Images Festival (Toronto), Visions du Reel (Switzerland), Xenix (Switzerland), Cork International Festival (Ireland), Cinema de Balie (Amsterdam), Mediawave Festival (Hungary), Impakt Festival (Holland), Vila do Conde Festival (Portugal), Jihlava Documentary Festival (Czech Republic), Stuttgarter Filmwinter (Germany), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen (France), Sixpack Film (Vienna), the Buenos Aires International Festival (Argentina), Pacific Cinematheque (Canada) and A Million Different Loves Festival in Poland.