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The streets are full of admirable craftsmen, but so few practical dreamers.' - Man Ray Welcome to the world of fringe movies. Here, artists have been busy putting queer shoulders to the wheels, or bending light to talk about First Nations rights (and making it funny, to boot), or demonstrating how a personality can be taken apart and put back together, all during a ten-minute movie which might take years to make. In Practical Dreamers , twenty-seven artists dish about how they get it done and why it matters. The conversations are personal, up close and jargon free, smart without smarting. Mike Hoolboom talks footage recycling with Alessa Cohene ( Supposed To ) and Jubal Brown ( Life Is Pornography ); investigates the documentaries of Donigan Cumming ( My Dinner With Weegee ); looks at the Middle East with Jayce Salloum ( This Is Not Beirut ); discusses identity with queer Asian avatars Richard Fung ( Dirty Laundry ), Midi Onodera ( The Displaced View ) and Ho Tam ( The Yellow Pages ), and First Nations vets Kent Monkman ( Blood River ) and Shelley Niro ( Honey Moccasin ); and addresses the visions of Peter Mettler ( Gambling, Gods and LSD ).
With the proliferation of digital projection, the presentation of moving images in art galleries has exploded exponentially. In the process, the relationship of experimental film to the gallery circuit has shifted dramatically. This volume, coming out of Mike Hoolboom's 2004 exhibition at the Art Gallery of York University, is a series of essays and conversations between artists, curators, and programmers that delineate the complicated path from the white cube to the black box. Mike Hoolboom has been called the finest fringe filmmaker of his generation. He has authored two books, Plague Years (1998), an anthology of his writings, and The Steve Machine (2008), a novel, and edited two books on fringe film practices, Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film in Canada (2000), and Practical Dreamers (2008). He has won over thirty international prizes and two lifetime achievement awards. He has also been the subject of nine retrospectives internationally. The Invisible Man was his first public gallery solo exhibition.
Part autobiography and part exploration of the human body, Plague Years combines Hoolboom's musings on life with textual and visual excerpts from his film, video and performances to create an emotionally-charged dialogue between life and work in the shadow of AIDS.
This is the first book to comprehensively examine the development of English-Canadian cinema since 1980; previous books in English have dealt either with specific films or filmmakers, with policy, or with specific genres (avant-garde film, documentary, films by women, etc.). It deals with regional and institutional questions, with the new authors that are defining contemporary cinema in English Canada, with avant-garde work and work by Aboriginal people. Bringing together a wide variety of contributors, the book deals with an enormous amount of cinema that has helped transform North American culture of the last two decades.
"Chase Joynt and Mike Hoolboom here give each other the gift so many people only dream of: ample, unhurried space to unspool crucial stories of one’s life, and an attentive, impassioned, invested, intelligent receiver on the other side. The gift to the reader is both the example of their exchange, and the nuanced, idiosyncratic, finely rendered examination it offers of biopolitical experiences which, in many ways, define our times. I’m so glad they have each other, and that we have this." – Maggie Nelson "You Only Live Twice is an intelligent ode to enchantment, to the possibilities that arise in their 'second lives' when all past expectations have been foreclosed." – Chris Kraus "Th...
Auden flees the small town of Capreol for Toronto, bewildered, HIV positive, and in search of an entirely new personality. He falls in love with orgy maestro Wrik, mainly because the old Auden would never even have talked to him. And through Wrik, he meets Steve Reinke, his new best friend. Steve – and here’s where it gets confusing – is, in real life as well as in The Steve Machine, a renowned video artist, someone who makes television for one person at a time, small-screen excursions designed to cure arthritis or night blindness. Despite being a virtuoso with video, however, Steve is not so good with love. He falls for a football star, and, with his medium-is-the-message videotapes, ...
Become immersed in the most innovative and vital in recent Canadian and international experimental film and video. Using the exhibition history of the Toronto screening group Pleasure Dome as a starting point to survey the work of independent film and videomakers during the 1990s, Lux delves into the work of these experimental artists with unprecedented depth and insight. The result is an anthology that provides an extensive overview of the period and also zooms in on the specific themes, oeuvres, styles and individual works that characterize the decade.
Artist and writer Steve Reinke is best know for his video work, an acerbic oeuvre that spans over a decade and includes his most famous piece, The Hundred Videos, literally a hundred short videos in which he explores the myriad permutations of identity, sexuality and art. The titles of his videos - In the Realm of Perpetual Embarrassment, Sad Disco Fantasia, How Photographs Are Stored in the Brain are some examples - encapsulate the tenor of Reinke's work: deadpan, self-deprecating, personal and always funny. Composed of original and found footage (from home movies, training films, porn flicks), the videos are typically diaristic, often philosophical, even elegaic. The writing itself is extremely well-crafted, possessing a wit and intelligence that translated well to the page; what seems improvisatory on screen is in fact very polished and precise prose. Everybody Loves Nothing contains Reinke's scripts from 1996 to the present, accompanied by numerous illustrative stills. An extensive interview with filmmaker Mike Holboom provides a broad overview of Reinke's career, themes and ambitions. Introduction by Lisa Steele, artistic director of Vtape.
Making It Like a Man: Canadian Masculinities in Practice is a collection of essays on the practice of masculinities in Canadian arts and cultures, where to “make it like a man” is to participate in the cultural, sociological, and historical fluidity of ways of being a man in Canada, from the country’s origins in nineteenth-century Victorian values to its immersion in the contemporary post-modern landscape. The book focuses on the ways Canadian masculinities have been performed and represented through five broad themes: colonialism, nationalism, and transnationalism; emotion and affect; ethnic and minority identities; capitalist and domestic politics; and the question of men’s relatio...
With reference to recent neurological research into Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) using new imaging technologies and models of implicit and explicit memory systems developed from this research, The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art examines the capacity of an artist’s cinema of experimental and avant-garde film to perform and communicate traumatic experience. De Bruyn analyses key films from the 1940s to the present that perform aspects of overwhelming experience through their approach, structure, content and perceptual impact, mapping a trajectory from analogue to contemporary digital moving image practice. He argues for the inclusion of Peter Gidal’s 1970s conception of...