An extraordinary re-working of moving image history from Hollywood fiction films to newsreels to documentary and scientific works. Both a situationist commentary, through the playful and iconoclastic way in which the works concerned are diverted, and at the same time a Sisyphean attempt to get another story to emerge from this magma of images. In ten chapters, Hoolboom gives consistency to nightmare-filled sleep and to waking dreams, with which he constructs a political and poetic reflection. Imitations of Life strains childhood through a history of reproduction, culling pictures from the Lumières to the present day in order to find the future in our past. Here are children of pictures, as pictures, the ones who will walk on our graves, granted a legacy of framing and image making that have helped shape their lives, and their ability to grieve those no longer around to share them.
Imitations of Life has ten parts: In the Future (3 min), Jack (15 min), Last Thoughts (7 min), Portrait (4 min), Secret (2 min), In My Car (5 min), The Game (5.5 min), Scaling (5 min), Imitation of Life (21 min), Rain (3.5 min). Viewers are welcome to watch the chapters straight through or in any order.

5 November, 21.45 h, Passos Manuel, Oporto
7 November, Lisbon Film Museum, Lisbon

Public Lighting examines the current media obsession with biography, offering up “different kinds of personality” (the obsessive, the narcissist...) as case studies, miniatures and possible examples. A mediation on photography, portraiture, self-portraiture, time, memory, language and public space. Public Lighting is an ideal introduction to Hoolboom’s audiovisual collage technique. Six chapters weave together found footage, on-screen text, homemovies, multiple voiceovers, old snapshots and a musical spectrum ranging from Madonna to Philip Glass.

21 October, 21.30h, Vila do Conde Auditorium
5 November, 15.30 h, Biblioteca Municipal Almeida Garrett, Oporto
8 November, Lisbon Film Museum, Lisbon