Wrik Mead | Hoolboom / 1999

we are the geography of all we know

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wrik Mead and Mike Hoolboom (screenwriters), Wrik Mead (director) Hoolboom / 1999

 

In 1999 Arts Toronto commissioned local filmmaker Wrik Mead to make a short film about his fellow gay filmmaker Michael Hoolboom, which Mead did working at points with the subject of his film.

    Hoolboom, born in 1959 just three years before Mead, is also a Toronto filmmaker and like Mead gay. He had made a substantial number of films by 1999, beginning in 1980. He first gained national attention for his filmmaking in 1986 with White Museum, but it wasn’t until Frank’s Cock in 1993 and Letter to Home in 1996 that he began to produce openly gay films. He freely admits, however, that his diagnosis of being HIV-positive in 1988 or ’89 gave what he describes as “new urgency” to his works, and his productions increased significantly after that period, all among with his now large body of work.

     By the time Mead worked with him on Hoolboom, the director had just released one of his major queer works, Panic Bodies (1998), which I discuss elsewhere in this volume.

      Mead’s film is not so a film about his friend as it muses on impressions of Hoolboom in relationship to issues of the body, self-awareness, and the art of filmmaking itself.

     The film begins with an almost ritualistic like act, a young naked man with a knife cutting open what appears to be a mummy. When he finishes cutting to open the other young man, covered with flowing blood—seemingly a mirror image of the boy—he sits up and hugs his savior whose body also begins the profusely bleed through what appear to be cuts and gashes.

      A man, dressed in protective gear, spray paints the word “responsibility” on the side of a wall.

    A narrator asks, “What if the revolution, you know the one that is going to be televised, the one that everyone’s been waiting for doesn’t involve the grip of communists at all, or the poor, the disenfranchised, the bearers of racial, sexual, and linguistic difference? What if the revolution begins closer to home? With our own limbs?” The voice wonders what if one day the hands were granted independence and decided they’d had enough of taking orders from nerve command central and decided to leave? He suggests that each of us might become our own Lincoln, granting emancipation to our various parts, letting them settle back into the world of independence. “We are, after all, the geography of all we know. Imperfect is our paradise.”

      That last two lines seem to hint at the way the rest of his 5-minute film will progress. Suddenly the young man we saw in the first scene, appears with a camera madly spinning in various directions, alternating with a paintbrush in hand.

      A face suddenly looms up much as in a talking head documentary, the image of Hoolboom himself floating atop a picture we can only assume to be Hoolboom’s the group portrait from his elementary school days. “Quite by accident,” the head begins, “he uncovers the secret joy of disappearance.” He describes the figure of whom he is speaking almost like Woody Allen’s character Zelig, moving into rooms so that no one notices, wearing a wardrobe that blends in with everything around him. “Everywhere he goes no one takes notice.” He describes the hundreds of animals in the wild that in fear of alerting their prey, move without moving. “He’s like them, storing memories like others store rations in case of nuclear collapse.” “…It was not the end of the world, he figured, but its beginning.”

       Clearly the spoken metaphors of this quite different kind of testimony are about Hoolboom’s cinematic methods, his willingness to let his hands, his entire body take him where they might go in order to embrace thoroughly other beings and places in his films. No Hoolboom film presents his view, but assimilates in a remarkable chameleon-like manner the other about who and with whom he collaborating in his film presentation. There is less a Hoolboom “style” or even a particular “subject”—only a hand full of his numerous films are about LGBTQ life, although many feature gay men—than a cinematic assimilation of scene and person in an attempt to present the constantly shifting others of his oeuvre.

      Like the figure in the first image of the film, Hoolboom becomes the other and takes on his or her personal pains, sufferings, and even diseases. Hacking into subjects thought to be dead, he brings the “other” alive in a way that few filmmakers are able to. Time and again, his works are titled by the interviewee’s name, the subject his film explores, or the geographical location. Abstract words that seem to indicate one thing are transformed through his filmic searches to mean something different. Instead of forcing the figures to come to him, he moves ever so gradually toward them, imitating their manner so that his work becomes the subject, the other.

      This film, not so coincidentally is not like any other Mead film, but more like a film which Hoolboom himself, who co-wrote the script with Mead, might make. At our best, we are not beings in statis, but individuals defined by the territories we have explored, the “geography of all we know.”

 

Los Angeles, November 16, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).