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Mike Hoolboom: Incident Reports

Mike Hoolboom: Incident Reports

Incident Reports, by Mike Hoolboom

At the Spielberg Theatre at The Egyptian, 6712 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90028

Los Angeles Premiere!

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.

www.mikehoolboom.com

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Incident Reports

Incident Reports

by Mike Hoolboom

2016, digital, 70min.

After a bike accident, the amnesiac undertakes audio-visual therapy by producing a suite of one minute shots. The voice-over weighs in on gender, animals and the end of literary culture. A love story essay featuring Elvis, wrestlers, boy ballet, naked cyclists and the heavenly voices of Choir Choir Choir.

“What we are determined not to know frees us and forces us to know something else.” Adam Phillips

“After a purported bike accident, the nameless amnesiac undertakes audio-visual therapy by producing a series of one-minute shots through the streets of Toronto. The result is an episodic love letter set against the city’s intimacies and haunts, populated by old and new acquaintances, while the disembodied voiceover weighs in on gender, animal, and the end of literary culture. Beginning from the position of the body in fugue, Incident Reports traces the most intimate of daily life changes through chronicling a back beat of the city’s endless transformation.” -- Amy Fung, Images Festival

“For an exploration of Toronto itself, check out Mike Hoolboom’s Incident Reports which marries a series of fixed shots of Toronto life – each around a minute in length – to a philosophical voice-over. The result is an evocative portrait of an individual disconnected from his community and seeking a way back in – which Hoolboom provides in an utterly unexpected (and delightful) way.” -- Norman Wilner, NOW Magazine

“Perhaps best described as a work of docu-fiction, Incident Reports presented a series of one-minute takes pulled from the filmmaker’s daily existence. The premise of the film advised viewers that the disembodied narrator was fulfilling an assignment from a therapist to help him restore his memory following an alleged bicycle accident. As Hoolboom took his camera around Toronto, the film afforded the sense of seeing one’s community through fresh eyes as the narrator speculated about the habits of his neighbours. Hoolboom’s act of filming like a cinematic flâneur stressed the awkwardness of attempting to create relationships in a city as cold and detached as Toronto. His camera invaded public spaces and caught random Torontonians avoiding the camera’s glance just as they do in elevators and the subway. As the meta-filmmaker gradually regained his sense of self, and, in turn, developed a bizarrely sexual relationship with the unseen therapist, Incident Reports humorously allowed audiences to remember what it felt like to be a part of a community as citizens took to the streets to sing Culture Club in unison. The screening was one of the stronger and stranger sights at Images [Festival].” (Pat Mullen, POV Magazine)

Running in the Muddy Twilight, Pasolini

Yet the passerby looking on

without the innocence of need

sought, as a stranger, communion there,

at least in the joy of passing and looking.