Imitations of Life

Canada

2003

75 Min

Color

English

Currently 3.8/5 Stars.
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CAST Janieta Eyre, Andrew Scorer, Liza Agrba, Mario Tenorio, Maya Popovich, Raidon Obokata

ED Ross Colvin Turnbull, Dennis Day, Robert Kennedy, Mark Karbusicky

Midsection in a trilogy of found-footage features (following last year’s “Tom”), Canadian experimentalist Mike Hoolboom’s “Imitations of Life” is an abstract work that’s abstruse in meaning but often beautiful and absorbing as a purely aesthetic experience. While it won’t travel far beyond usual fest and cinematheque berths for avant-garde work, pic furthers cements maker’s rep as one of North America’s leading younger non-mainstream film and video artists.

Vid is divided into 10 chaptered sections of various lengths, their different textures abetted by use of four editors (and guest music/sound designer Earle Peach’s contrib on two segs). Stated theme is childhood memory, though that’s seldom obvious, with most explicitly relevant piece “Jack” chronicling growth of Hoolboom’s nephew via homemovies. With its pretentiously philosophical voiceover commentary, it’s actually one of the weaker miniatures. More striking are “The Game’s” eerie compilation of fictive mass-death scenes, and titular seg’s hallucinatory microscope views of primitive life preceding an array of sci-fi futurescapes. Computer animation, commercials, silent pics, docus, commercial feature excerpts both familiar (“Chinatown,” “2001,” et al.) and obscure, plus equally diverse soundtrack bites, are all lent fresh resonance by helmer’s mastery of cinematic collage. —Dennis Harvey (Variety.com)

Director

Mike Hoolboom

Mike Hoolboom is a Canadian artist working in film and video. He has made over fifty films and videos, though most have been withdrawn from circulation, approximately a dozen remain on view.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), 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), and A Million Different Loves Festival in Poland.

He is a founding… read more

Mike Hoolboom is a Canadian artist working in film and video. He has made over fifty 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), 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), and A Million Different Loves Festival in Poland.

He is a founding member of the Pleasure Dome screening collective and has worked as the artistic director of the Images Festival and as the experimental film co-ordinator at Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre.

Mike Hoolboom has published a pair of interview books with Canadian media artists, Practical Dreamers: Conversations with Media Artists (Coach House Press, 2008) and Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film in Canada (Coach House Press, 2001). He has edited or co-edited books on Frank Cole, Barbara Sternberg and Philip Hoffman, in addition to publishing electronic books on Deirdre Logue, Dani Leventhal, Al Razutis, Mike Cartmell, Steve Reinke, American Fringe Movies and the Documentary. In 1998 he authored Plague Years (YYZ Books) a tongue-in-chic autobiography. His first novel The Steve Machine was published by Coach House Press in the fall of 2008. He has published more than one hundred articles on fringe media which have appeared in magazines and catalogues around the world.

Since 2004 he has been working on Fringe Online (www.fringeonline.ca ), a web project which makes available the archives of 40 Canadian media artists. This ongoing project currently consists of hundreds of pages of transcripts, reviews, interviews and scripts, and remains the largest publishing project in the Canadian fringe media sector. —mikehoolboom.com

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