Tom Chomont | Oblivion / 1969

december song

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tom Chomont (director) Oblivion / 1969

 

Before we can even experience the wonders of the 5-minutes of the experimental film by Tom Chomont titled Oblivion, it might be best to know what it is that we are actually seeing. In this instance it is a portrait of a young neighborhood hustler, with about 30 images repeated in various combinations and completeness. Canadian filmmaker Mike Hoolboom describes the actual film process:

 “Approximately thirty images comprise Oblivion. Most obsessively repeat themselves. Although the images appear to be solarized, the film was actually contact-printed, combining high contrast black and white negative with a colour positive of the same image. The high contrast accounts for the tendency of shots to flood. Images in the film swell and contrast, often disappearing into pure colour… Oblivion employs extremely rapid cutting. Some of the images last as briefly as two frames. The fact that we see so few frames, that a shot is representationally ambiguous, or shown upside down and sideways, often causes the viewer to project his/her own fantasies… When Jean Genet was asked to what end he was directing his life he responded, “To oblivion.” (J.J. Murphy, Reaching for Oblivion).”

    But even that very specific summary of Chomont’s process doesn’t tell us very much. Perhaps it is useful to contextualize these images within what filmmaker Jim Hubbard has described as Chomont’s fascination of the commonplace that functions to as expressing both spiritual and a sexualized worlds in a parallel universe.

     It might help to know that in his later decades this filmmaker suffered from Parkinson’s disease, and later because a devotee of S&M culture. Tragically, Chomont could not get financial help for his Parkinson’s until in his very last years he was diagnosed as HIV-positive when finally some aid could be expended on both diseases which plagued his body.

     For me this beautiful eye-blink of a film begins with an image of a highly sexualized boy that gets broken down again and again into its fragments, coming alive to shoot bodily shards across the emptiness of the frame. The body is there perhaps waiting in anticipation of its pleasure as the screen bursts into what appear to be archeological patterns and fountains of light, but again and again disintegrates, flies into bits and pieces, decomposing before our very eyes. If this is, in part, a testimony to sexual pleasure and love, it is simultaneously a statement of its transitoriness and the oblivion of all life.

     The film, accordingly, alternates between a palpable reality and an abstract entity, a thing grounded in space that flings itself into forms and shapes.

     If the film ends in a beautiful image of the natural world, it is also the cold and frozen world of winter, the end of the almost Christmas-colored (red and greens) testimony to what is the living being at the heart of this tale of passion and death.

     Yes, this is a highly sexual work. Yes, this is a statement about the end of things, the cessation of the loving heart. As Ross Lipman observes: “At the intersection of eroticism, mysticism, and the everyday one finds Tom Chomont.”

  Chomont made 40 short films between 1962 and 1989, and Oblivion is one of his best.

 

Los Angeles, December 6, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).