Douglas Messerli | A Mind Struggles to Know What to Do with the Body: Mike Hoolboom's Panic Bodies / 2025 [Introduction]

a mind struggles to know what to do with the body: mike hoolboom’s panic bodies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mike Hoolboom (director) Panic Bodies / 1998 [Introduction]

 

In 1989, after donating blood, Canadian experimental director Mike Hoolboom was told that he was HIV-positive. During the six years after his diagnosis, he helmed 27 more films, altering his subject matter in order to focus on HIV/AIDS and the surrounding issues, including, as the Wikipedia entry describes them, “the impermanence of existence and sexuality.”

     In 1993 he directed Frank’s Cock, an eight-minute film on an unidentified man, acted by Callum Keith Rennie, who noted that he considered himself the “Michael Jordan of sex,” while still losing his lover Frank to AIDS. The film, which I review in an earlier volume, represented its ideas and subject matter in the form of a monologue accompanied by a split-screen of four images. It won the Best Canadian Short Film award at the Toronto International Film Festival.

    In 1998 Hoolboom released his feature-length film titled Panic Bodies, like Frank Cock’s concerned with the body, its changes, invasion with AIDS, and ultimate fragmentation. Most of the film’s 6 sections were released separately and are still often shown that way, so here I treat them as separate films, even though their true significance lies in their being show together. Below is a review of all its various parts, along with a discussion of some of their scripts, so that the reader might get a true sense of the full-length masterwork, one of the most important works of what I have described as “the second wave” of films concerning AIDS.

    As Jim Sinclair, writing in Pacific Cinematheque summarizes the full work:

 

“We have come to expect only the dazzling and uncommon from the prolific, prodigiously talented, and frequently transgressive Mike Hoolboom, perhaps the most important Canadian experimental filmmaker of his generation, and the startlingly beautiful Panic Bodies delivers the potent goods. Like much of Hoolboom’s gorgeous, unsettling recent work, Panic Bodies is infused with an AIDS-era horror at the body under siege, with a palpable sense of wonder and revulsion at our flesh-and-blood corporeality, at ‘being a stranger in your own skin.’ The film’s multi-levelled meditation on morality moves from rage to reverie, and unfolds in six often-hallucinatory episodes: Positiv, a multi-screen monologue about AIDS; A Boy’s Life, a masturbatory revel; Eternity, a reflection on Disneyland and death, 1+1+1 a devilish, pixilated black comedy; Moucle’s Island, a nostalgic lesbian idyll; and the concluding, elegiac Passing On.”