It’s with a flood of images that Mike Hoolboom invites us to confront ourselves. What immediately strikes us, and what also fascinates, is the extraordinary density of this torrent, as well as its fundamental impurity.

Hoolboom feeds his films from excerpts taken, on one hand, from a magnificent hold-up store that he creates from the legacy of cinema and TV’s history (he stocks up as if he was in a supermarket, from an entire range of products, from Hollywood’s films to found-footage). On the other hand, he makes his own images, using the camera as a means of investigation, enthused by an exceptional curiosity. Thus, with all these excerpts gathered together, Hoolboom makes complex films which are still very simple, telling fragments of stories that portray faces, bodies and voices. As examples we have paradigmatic shorts such as “Miss You”, “Amy”, “In the Theatre” and “Fontage”. His films outline delicate questions: the loss of a loved one, the mystery of a body, of a face, death at work and family ties.
Mike Hoolboom is an inventor of forms; he creates a new imagery, visually and aesthetically. His shots are usually short, that is, really short, and it’s during the editing process that their meaning is developed. Hoolboom is a master at editing to which he dedicates considerable time. He perseveres in the quest for a length made out of long breaths that will prolong the short gasps of so many images. At the very core of Hoolboom’s cinema, Hoolboom plays with the issues of memory, reflection and meditation which ensue from the sphere of rhythms, from controlled breathing. But the composition of his films owes a lot to the extraordinary richness of his soundtracks, the beauty of the voices: the audio dimension of his work is fascinating in the way it approaches the frontier between conscious and unconscious, between wakefulness and dream, between primal fears and healthy thoughts.

Mike Hoolboom’s work is a metaphor of the universe of cinema in which we progress like frightened sleepwalkers towards the rays of light. Indispensable, they fertilise our memory to revert the process of oblivion of beings and things. It’s an existential uneasiness, a malicious lucidity too, that gives Hoolboom’s work a moving beauty. He dedicates himself to a reinvention of cinema that he develops within cinema itself (and within its television avatars). His work, made of inflexions of a palimpsest that remains susceptible of being rewritten, is necessarily marginal and iconoclastic. It gives meaning to a vision of the world in which, it’s true, images show death at work. But Mike Hoolboom is not morbid. It’s rather the comforting feeling of unsuspected pleasures that he allows us to share.

Jean Perret

Director
Visions du Réel
Nyon International Film Festival
Festival International de Cinéma de Nyon
[www.visionsdureel.ch](http://www.visionsdureel.ch/)

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