“Freedom from Everything.” In Mike Hoolboom: Work, ed. Clint Enns (Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute, 2025), 24-25.

While completing the last stages of a PhD, I began working at an auction house in Montreal. I was hired as a photographer, but the majority of my job consisted of the Sisyphean task of temporarily stacking and restacking furniture. After a year, both my attention and the discs in my lower back began to slip. Complaints echoed in the back of my head, but the weight of labour often tethered me.

In those early days of the Covid lockdown, when my savings rendered me nonessential, I dared to dream of societal transformation. We were all in this together, all vulnerable. After the first rounds of vaccinations, I was deep in debt and desperately needed a job, so I became a dishwasher at a high-end French restaurant. The plates I cleaned whispered tales of economic disparity, as my dentist, a patron of decadence, dined on a meal costing more than my month’s grind. Every plate I washed, each glass I polished, became a humble act of resistance against the economic pandemic that loomed alongside the global health crisis.

Returning to the Covid pandemic through Hoolboom’s Freedom from Everything provides a lifeline back to those days, resurrecting memories already drowned in the cacophony of contemporary crises. It was a time when people’s thoughts were replaced by memes, another virus exacerbated by the pandemic. In the tradition of Ishmael Reed’s fictional Jes Grew virus—a manifestation of Blackness which Reed uses to expose the power and inherent racism of the ruling class—Freedom from Everything uses the Covid virus to reflect on neoliberal ideology and conceptions of freedom.

The video includes writing from Hito Steyerl’s 2013 e-flux essay “Freedom from Everything: Freelancers and Mercenaries” and extends it to include both the AIDS and Covid pandemics. In her essay, Steyerl argues that “contemporary freedom is not primarily the enjoyment of civil liberties, as the traditional liberal view has it, but rather like the freedom of free fall, experienced by many who are thrown into an uncertain and unpredictable future.” Although the freedoms that many argue for are often positive—freedom of expression, freedom to live as one pleases— there are other types of freedoms, particularly for the precariat. As Steyerl argues, “They are negative freedoms, and they apply across a carefully constructed and exaggerated cultural alterity that promotes: the freedom from social security, the freedom from the means of making a living, the freedom from accountability and sustainability, the freedom from free education, healthcare, pensions and public culture, the loss of standards of public responsibility, and in many places, the freedom from the rule of law.”

While the freedom from economic security led me to a new life as a dishwasher, it also introduced me to new forms of mutual support which are rarely experienced in academia or the arts, where competition is a large part of the game. In the kitchen, we genuinely looked after and cared for each other’s well-being. While denied other freedoms, we, like Kurosawa’s freelancers and mercenaries, formed bonds through our shared labours. As a dishwasher, it was easy to understand both Steyerl’s idea of negative freedom and how new forms of resistance emerged from the precariat: solidarity and giving what you take.

Mirrors

“Mirrors.” In Mike Hoolboom: Work, ed. Clint Enns (Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute, 2025), 128.

Mike Hoolboom: How do you choreograph rhythm in your films?

Ingmar Bergman: Rhythm is conceived in the script. All forms of improvisation are alien to me. If I am ever forced into hasty decisions, I grow sweaty and rigid with terror. Filming for me is an illusion, planned in detail.

MH: Without improvisation, how do you ensure that an actor performs without appearing rigid?

IB: One of the greatest actors of all time, a brilliant portrayer of innumerable heroes and fools, was suffering in his seventy-seventh year from circulation trouble in his left leg. An operation was deemed necessary, but he refused. After a performance, I thanked him. He looked at me in the mirror with cold contempt and said, “To hell with your damned ingratiation. I know what you’re up to.” Of course, the most important task of an actor is to focus on and respond to his fellow player. With no you, no I.

MH: Spiritualist Michael Stone once said, “Awareness is like a mirror that doesn’t take the shape of what’s reflected.” How do you see mirrors in your films? What do you see reflected?

IB: Mirrors serve as existential portals, akin to the reflection of Stone’s awareness. They carry that most called-upon and least desirable virtue: honesty. The mirror is a space where the self unravels and the boundaries of identity dissolve. It reflects not just physical appearances but the profound interplay between external reality and internal conflict. In other words, it reflects what isn’t there. It shows what we have taught ourselves to ignore.

MH: Cinema can be an elusive mirror, one that makes it difficult to recognize our own face. IB: During the production of The Seagull—a play which helped shape Through a Glass Darkly (1961)—my then-wife Ka’bi and I moved into a handsome villa, two people chasing after identity and security. We wrote each other’s parts, which we both accepted in our great need to please each other. The masks quickly cracked and fell to the ground in the first storm, and neither of us had the patience to look at the other’s face.

MH: What do you think about the supercut as a cinematic form?

IB: Like the fleeting summary images of my own life I saw just before dying, the supercut is death. It signals that something is over. A life, a project, a point of view. Now it’s time for the archive. Let’s call it: the archive of archives.

MH: Why did you stop making films?

IB: My anxiety slowly and imperceptibly disappeared. My life’s most faithful companion, inherited from both parents, the very centre of my identity. Not only the torment, the anguish, and the feeling of humiliation faded, but the driving force of my creativity also fell away.

Now, Yours [previously Louisiana Purchase]

“Now, Yours.” In Mike Hoolboom: Work, ed. Clint Enns (Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute, 2025), 210.

Before a screening of Louisiana Purchase at the Funnel, it is rumoured that the ever-scissor-happy Mary Brown of the now defunct Ontario Censor Board demanded to be shown a copy of the film. Mary was on a personal crusade to end underground cinema after the Canadian Images Film Festival had shown Al Razutis’s film A Message from Our Sponsor (1979) without first submitting it to the Censor Board. It became her mission to personally watch every underground film being shown in order to weed out all the degenerate artists that were hiding in the very dark shadows of the underground, and to control every single cinema in Ontario . . . no screen was too small.

After handmade countdown leader and a lecture challenging the audience to revolt against the one-way dialogue presented by the media they are currently watching, we are shown a title card: “And now eleven films so brutal, so horrifying, they had to be kept from the public for over a century.” Apparently, Mary took this claim literally, but couldn’t determine exactly what scenes the title was referring to. To her, the images looked normal. What can be horrific about the news or game shows that promise that you too could be lucky enough to own your own electronic backgammon game? She understood the film was intended to be subversive, but she could not find “just cause” to censor any specific section of the film, in spite of the film’s initial threat.

In a Hail Mary, she noticed that the last section of the film had closing credits lifted from those “nice boys” down at Ontario Travel Film. At that moment, she did something that was out of her jurisdiction, but “for a cause that she was equally concerned about”—copyright infringement. She took it upon herself to chop out the credits, assuming she would kill two birds with one stone: Hoolboom would no longer show his artistically compromised work, and Roy Crost would have his credits back. Fortunately, punks don’t believe in concepts like “artistic integrity” and Hoolboom was no stranger to constantly recutting his own works. Louisiana Purchase became Now, Yours.¹

1. In reality, the CFMDC 16mm print of Now, Yours was cut down at a screening when a projectionist mistook a long stretch of red film frames as tail leader. This projectionist error had nothing to do with the title change, which had been implemented decades earlier. All the same, the reality is that Mary Brown and the Ontario Censor Board were truly this ruthless in their policing of the Funnel and other institutions that screened films in this era. [↩]