Mike Hoolboom | 1+1+1 / 1993 [Panic Bodies, Part 4]

important adjustments

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mike Hoolboom (director) 1+1+1 / 1993 [3 minutes]

 

In the penultimate film of Hoolboom’s great Panic Bodies, as Geoff Pevere commented: “A pixilate couple plays dress-up and undress-up as Earle Peache’s industrial-strength audio track pulsate and ebbs with churning tides of sound.”

     But I far prefer Hoolboom’s own comments:

“Devils fall in love in Seattle in a black comedy of sex, machines and flight. Photographed a frame at a time over three days, 1+1+1 shows us the wordless tale of unlikely lovers, the first appearing as a hovering devil in flight, excreting a vegetable life, while her's clock-spitting, bathing-besuited figure lifts weights in a frank measure of indifference. Their touch promotes a shimmering aura of light, a celestial forcefield which they lash against, finally retiring to the kitchen with a clutch of tools to fine tune desire. Could I fix you? Donning each other's clothes, they fly off together to the strains of Strauss's Blue Danube Waltz.”

 

   What is truly remarkable about this 3-minute piece is it’s interchange of the abstract and the naturalistic as this heterosexual couple, once inhabited by the devil’s within themselves, attempt to readjust to their lives, the female (Katherine Ramey), in particular attempting to literally take hammer and nail, pliers, and many another tool to readjust her failed companion (Jason Boughton).

     It only works when they can literally change genders, and comprehend what each other might desire, which at the very moment sends them flying off in the universe with new purpose.

     You might say that this work is a true realization of what filmmaker Marie Mencken might have desired in order to re-create her failed partner gay partner, poet and filmmaker Willard Maas; or what Edward Albee’s Martha tries to accomplish in one evening to which we’re privy with her weakling of a lover George.

     Had they only imagined that what they truly needed was simply a mutual transgender shift!

     Critic Jean Perret, writing in Visions du Réel makes it clear, this might be the solution to many a heterosexual couple’s problems:

 

“Howling sirens and film which seems to be burning evoke the violence of war. From the ruins of the images, a man and a woman gradually emerge. Without a word but with a powerfully suggestive soundtrack, Hoolboom sets the stage for a strange dry-humoured theatre. Particularly daunting is the role of the woman who ironically delights in doing violence to the man. With its great formal inventiveness combining accelerated sequences and pixilation, this film is as jarring as the lives of many couples.”

 

Los Angeles, June 21, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).