“Carefully Looking: An Interview with Mike Hoolboom.” In Mike Hoolboom: Work, ed. Clint Enns (Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute, 2025), 213-217.
Clint Enns: Since you began making films, you have been engaging with institutional critique and media criticism, both in writing and in your flicks. Over the years the critique has become broader in scope and more nuanced, measured, and sophisticated, but also a little less punk. Early on there was White Museum (1986) and Now, Yours (1981) and articles like “ABCs of the Canon” and “Complaints.” Now there is Witches and the Origins of Capitalism (2023) and Haifa (2022) and articles like “The Right Questions” and “Rotterdam and the Accountant Revolution.”1 Can you describe the state of the scene at this point? Do you see it as better or worse than when you started?
Mike Hoolboom: Worse for whom? There is a genocide happening in Gaza at this very moment. What does it mean to see images of thousands of children dying “in real time” hour after hour? Some reports are made with the certainty that if “everyone” knew what was happening it would stop. How to step into the shoes of the most unwanted, to embrace these shaky, handmade testaments and rescue them from invisibility, if only for a moment? Or as Sarah Aziza asks, What does all this looking do?
In this, our language, the verb to witness comes from the root شهيد.This is also the source of the much-maligned word شهيد, shaheed, which means, literally, witnesser, but is often translated as martyr. It is a word with many folds of meaning and history. It carries connotations not only of seeing, but of presence and proximity. To be a witness is to make contact, to be touched, and to bear the marks of this touch.2
CE: From punk to k-punk. Scene politics look pretty petty next to settler-colonial politics, but with local politics it seems that small changes are possible. After our recent experiences on the Pleasure Dome board, is it even possible to imagine joining another artist-run board?3
MH: I’m sure you remember the moment when you volunteered to become Pleasure Dome’s projectionist, arriving early at every show to make sure the tech was smooth. Relieved that they would not have to take on these unwanted servant tasks, the board was effusive with temporary thanks. One turned to you and said, “You can put this on your résumé!” Both of us burst out laughing. The idea that you would join a volunteer artist-run centre board to build a career was just part of the problem afflicting that organization and too many others. Though it was eye-opening that a roomful of young sharpies wanted to become curators instead of artists. There was rent to be paid.
CE: I wish there was more care for artists and their work than there was about putting another line on your résumé. Speaking of rent, in your most recent work, Witches and the Origins of Capitalism, you explore questions related to land ownership and the commons. Do you see your uses of stolen images as a form of pushback against these concepts of ownership?
MH: In the 1980s, Toronto was filled with troves of discarded films that could be touched, though it took some years to learn how to let them touch me back. I scratched into 60s game shows in an attempt to undo gender stereotypes. I recut an Air Canada commercial, separating each frame with decreasing lengths of black in order to unpack exotic fantasies. For months I scratched every word of a dictionary onto black leader in an attempt to “begin again,” to relearn language subliminally. The words flashed by too quickly to be read, but I imagined the film as a machine that would retrain the language centres.
CE: Letter from Fred (2023) includes a letter from a filmmaker turned atheist Benedictine monk, the last line of which reads, “P.S. There is life after movies.” Is this true? Can you imagine a life without creating movies? What would you do with your time?
MH: Last year I would have said tennis, but now my knees protest so loudly it disturbs other players. I was never supposed to be a filmmaker, nothing about the practice fit, so I spent decades zealously taking wrong turns. Now that I have hacked out a small perch, it seems that screen culture has become a central part of the neoliberal playbook, not to mention the parasitic double life of asocial media Naomi Klein describes so well in Doppelganger. Perhaps I could swap the quicksand of the attention economy for a new job and become a chocolate cake tester.
CE: Poetry and literary fiction seem to have avoided the pitfalls of neoliberalism, and there are many who see you as a writer and editor. I could also see you as an influencer or as a life coach. There’s also money in self-help. Who is Michael Stone? Have you joined a cult? How has Centre of Gravity changed your idea of a practice?
MH: I spent nearly a decade in a Zen cult grounded in daily sitting practice and yoga. I’m still up for the yoga but have dropped the freeze-frame of meditation, preferring the trance of editing. Practice invited me to “come back to my senses,” and remapped the basics: how to eat, how to sit in a chair, how to walk into a room. Silence can be a fine companion but a difficult friend.
CE: In recent years, you have taught classes and workshops all over the world. How has this affected your practice?
MH: I just finished a sound workshop at EICTV [Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión] in Cuba. After the deep isolation and grieving of the pandemic, it felt like coming back to life. In an interview I made with musician Slavek Kwi, he described his first workshop with autistic kids. On the way to school he picked up discarded and forgotten items from the street. Upon arrival, he put them all in a big pile in the middle of the room. He invited the kids to make two piles: one for “musical instruments” and the other for things that were not “musical instruments.” When they were done he went to the non-instrument heap and went through every item, rubbing it, knocking it, shaking it, and then asking, But isn’t this music too? Eventually there was only one pile, the whole class agreed: Everything was a musical instrument. And with that they began to play music together. I did the same with my students, and we learned to communicate, to listen to each other without language. It was so beautiful.
CE: You have always had some of the best sound design on the festival circuit and now have one of the largest noninstitutional databases of sounds in the world. Can you give an overview of the archive? As a sound collector and sampler, what sounds excite you? Is it rarity? Is it fidelity? Is it a specific sound?
MH: Yesterday I heard a fantastical trilling texture careening between stereo channels, an almost wet-to-the-touch rhythm that recalled J Dilla’s hiccupping syncopations. What was it? At the end of the track a man’s voice declaims in a language I can’t make out, but it’s clear he’s hawking street wares. The sound must have been his cart rattling across a broken stroll. Who will listen to the song of this difficult walk, the invisible man pushing the burden of his unwanted memories across every street corner? I used to joke that the archive contained every sound, but of course it doesn’t. I collect deeply in categories like water, cars (is traffic the most difficult event to record?), underwater, contact microphones, bird wings. I have a deep collection of wind sounds. Is there a thought I’ve ever had that wasn’t carried by the wind? Last year I recovered an ear for science fiction, in the possible worlds emerging alongside this one, and the meticulously crafted sounds that every utopia requires.
CE: Lovin’ the J Dilla reference. Want to talk about your love of hip-hop and producer culture? From your soundtracks, one might assume you were more into William Basinski than Kanye West, but from your editing . . .
MH: In the 2000s I developed big fan love for Miles Davis, particularly his Second Great Quintet (1963–68) featuring Herbie Hancock on keys, teenage sensation Tony Williams on drums, Ron Carter on bass, and icon Wayne Shorter on sax. I listened to them obsessively, convinced that if I could understand the structure of their albums, I would know how to make films. What followed was a long and unexpected segue into the work of Kanye West. I loved the multiple versions he would make available in a steady stream of leaks (from his “cousin’s laptop”) that echoed my own restless reworkings. Though he also leaked stems and fragments, prompting a legion of listeners to create their own remixes, which were more than occasionally better than anything the maestro produced. The death of the author? I related to the obsessive workaholism and deep engagement with remix culture. Basinski created a second life by returning to the smallest fragments of his analog youth and looping them into decaying infinities. But Ye found himself by clipping moments of other people’s work and rearranging them, just like every other hip-hop producer. This practice sings deeply with my embrace of found/stolen footage. It is the work of deep listening, community, and solidarity. How predictably sad that success has helped turn Ye into another mirror-world bigot.
CE: In your practice, your work is also constantly in transition. You are constantly reworking your movies and recalling older works or editing versions of older works into new ones. Given that the establishment likes stability, even in the arts, this is a radical gesture. When do you consider a work finished?
MH: The fantasy is time travel, being able to return to the wounds of the past with a warm embrace, a healing touch. Every movie builds a double architecture, the one growing on the timeline, and its shadow double, the distillation of roads not taken, the un-film, or to use a trade term: the negative cut. Perhaps I am not reediting but changing the relationship between these two worlds. When they become compost for someone else’s work, the work is done.
CE: Experimental film distribution, or lack thereof, has always been a complaint of filmmakers, but you have actively made some of your works inaccessible. In an era of transparency, counterarchives, and archival fever, what’s up with these anti-archival impulses?
MH: Let’s imagine three aspects of fringe filmmaking: production, distribution, exhibition. When I began work in the 1980s, exhibition spaces were run by artists. Today, under neoliberalism, exhibition spaces are helmed by administrators who run festivals. Artists provide not only work but fees to support institutions large and small. Many require premieres, creating a limited shelf life. After that it becomes part of a fathomless and mostly forgotten heap, a visible invisibility. There’s already too many things to see.
CE: What does it mean to be an HIV-positive artist living in the post-cocktail era? Being HIV- positive once meant you had no choice but to create with a certain urgency, yet today you continue to work with urgency. Where does this creative energy stem from?
MH: I am a projection of the information economy which, as Byun-Chul Han notes, requires ceaseless data flow. I am stuck in someone else’s habits, and not for the first time. Are pictures part of the problem, now that they have become such a central part of the surveillance state? Can pictures be reclaimed as a site of resistance, as I once imagined was the whole point when my own participation in the counterculture began, or is it too late for that?
CE: Your work is also often made collaboratively, while not necessarily being a collaboration per se. You have worked with many artists, reworking their texts, recording their voices, using their images and sounds. You have even worked with many editors, especially in the era of video editing suites. Can you talk about the nature of collaboration in relation to your work?
MH: I wish I were better suited for collaboration. Perhaps if I had a new body or were less anxious or could learn teleportation. I think the hoped-for joint effort with Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby fell apart because they are creatures of the deadline while I work all the time. The book collaboration with Chase Joynt ended with yet another mental swan dive on my part, immobile and inert, back in bed. With Camilo Constain I would write endless letters, begging him for scenes. There would be long gaps, and then he would send more no-light magics, the bodies hardly visible, just the last shred of magic hour faintly glowing. With Kika Thorne it was all about the shooting; we had so little footage but everything sparkled. I cut the soundtrack too quickly so she made her own edit, which meant the movie played twice with his-and-her accompaniments. In Vancouver, I would show up at Earle Peach’s place with new footage and he would just pick up whatever instrument he had lying around and ask with his eyes, “Something like this?” It was like watching a birth from inside my mother.
- Mike Hoolboom, “ABCs of the Canon,” LIFT Newsletter, December 1993, 9–11; “Complaints,” in Projecting Questions?, ed. Michael Maranda (Art Gallery of York University, 2009), 134–39; “The Right Questions,” POV, May 29, 2018; “Rotterdam and the Accountant Revolution,” Panorama-Cinéma, January 25, 2023. [↩]
- Sarah Aziza, “The Work of the Witness,” Jewish Currents, January 12, 2024, . [↩]
- Hoolboom and I were Pleasure Dome board members together from 2015 to 2017. For a history of the Funnel, see Mike Hoolboom, Underground: The Untold History of the Funnel Film Collective (Canadian Film Institute, 2017). A history of Pleasure Dome has yet to be written. [↩]