Mike Hoolboom: Work, edited by Clint Enns (Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute, 2025).

Contents

Introduction

Mike Hoolboom works in the tradition of the untraditional, at the fringes of the movie factory which have slowly turned from DIY gatherings of outsiders and weirdos into a cottage industry. The movies that Hoolboom makes are no-budget resistances, both to their big-budget counterparts and the ideologies they embody. Given that Hoolboom has been producing moving images for over four decades, it shouldn’t be surprising that his impetus for making this type of work has mutated over time. While the subject matter has changed, the spirit of rebellion remains, and the anger and passion that once fuelled his work has been fine-tuned and transformed into a more sophisticated form of political critique.

Hoolboom is a post-Zen Marxist inspired by the writings of Silvia Federici, Mark Fisher, Hito Steyerl, Byung-Chul Han, Christina Sharpe, Naomi Klein, and Paul B. Preciado, among others. He is an avid reader and spends too much time watching and writing about movies. He believes in the commons, that once words and images have entered the public realm they become fair to use and transform. In addition to fair use, he harbours ideals of fairness and believes in volunteer community efforts that celebrate and document local cultures. His artworks are ways to think through and visualize ideas.

He was born in Ontario and in the 80s went to Sheridan College, where he became a member of the Escarpment School, a group of filmmakers who studied under Rick Hancox and Jeffrey Paull and whose members include Carl Brown, Philip Hoffman, Richard Kerr, Gary Popovich, Steve Sanguedolce, Janis Cole, Holly Dale, Marian McMahon, Mike Cartmell, Lorne Marin, and Alan Zweig. Hoolboom was a member of the Funnel, a radical artist-run centre that focused on experimental filmmaking, and in 2017 he released a book about the organization titled Underground: The Untold Story of the Funnel Film Collective. He is one of the founding members of Pleasure Dome and has worked for both the CFMDC and Images Festival.

Hoolboom’s earliest films are formal experiments, attempts to unpack the language of filmmaking and the mechanics of meaning making. They were aimed at complicating the one-way mode of communication presented by corporate media, calling into question notions of passive spectatorship, asking who owns and controls dominant image culture. In 1988, Hoolboom was diagnosed with HIV, marking a shift in focus in his work to themes of sex, death, and living with HIV. The work became more personal and intimate while still maintaining a defiant punk attitude. By the 2000s, Hoolboom had begun to make cinematic portraits of friends, including a biopic of underground filmmaker Tom Chomont and a documentary about animal activist, filmmaker, and collaborator Mark Karbusicky.

His later works are centred around injustices that stem from hypercapitalism, including racial injustice, class inequities, colonial violence, and global imperialism. He has continued to make filmic portraits along with several films about living through the AIDS pandemic into the era of the cocktail. His works continue to deal with viruses, but his conception of the virus has expanded: Capitalism, racism, and imperialism all act as viruses infecting (and affecting) both bodies and minds, with some people more susceptible than others. His portraits have stretched traditional documentary practices and inhabit a more philosophical and poetic space. The work remains infused with a layer of affect borrowed from his stolen images and densely constructed sound designs.

Over the years, Hoolboom has produced many movies—perhaps too many for any one person to track down and watch. Moreover, the films are in an ongoing state of transition, often subject to radical revisions and retouches by the filmmaker. Hoolboom is always grappling with new ideas, thinking through images, creating visuals to carry emotions that are too difficult or complicated to resolve in a single viewing. In this anthology, I have attempted to compile a complete filmography by combing through ancient distribution catalogues and including movies that have been withdrawn and are no longer available, although the elements for some of these early works are available from the archives at the Cinémathèque québécoise. While the sheer mass of this filmography is a testament to Hoolboom’s commitment to his practice, it exists in this form purely as a reference. I provide a more practical guide for navigating Hoolboom’s work in the form of a curated selection titled “Essential Movies.”

In 1998, YYZ released Plague Years, an edited collection of Hoolboom’s scripts, essays, and stories. Since that time, he has edited more than thirty books with writings dedicated to the works of fellow fringe filmmakers, including Jorge Lozano, Alexandra Gelis, Steve Reinke, Frank Cole, Deirdre Logue, Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, Al Razutis, David Rimmer, Dani (Leventhal) ReStack, Mike Cartmell, Ellie Epp, Madi Piller, Christine Lucy Latimer, Rebecca Garrett, Phillip Barker, b.h. Yael, and Birgit Hein. He has also produced two books of interviews with Canadian filmmakers, Inside the Pleasure Dome and Practical Dreamers; a novel, The Steve Machine; and a work of autotheory, You Only Live Twice (cowritten with Chase Joynt).

This is the first monograph of writings dedicated to Hoolboom’s work. It contains a diverse range of texts and essays from scholars, activists, artists, writers, and friends. In the spirit of inclusion, we wanted to showcase as many different voices as possible. The book is constructed around writing that is short and concise. As such, none of the essays are all-encompassing, nor do they act as the final, definitive word. Instead, the book offers an accumulation of glances where details are offered in place of the big picture. If one connects the dots and squints just a little, it is possible to make out a lived practice that is as socially and politically engaged as it is enraged at the wide variety of injustices that the world has to offer.

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the support of a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship and a grant from the Ontario Arts Council. Deepest gratitude to Andrew Burke for his advice and encouragement as my postdoctoral supervisor at the University of Winnipeg. I’d like to thank Kathryn for her support throughout the project; she read drafts, helped with translations, and listened to me endlessly drone on. I’d like to offer my sincerest gratitude to Cameron Moneo, who is definitely the best copyeditor within my group of friends, if not all of Canada. I’d like to thank Leslie Supnet for her beyond beautiful cover design. The cover image is a still from footage of the Broadview Developmental Center shot in 1967 by Escarpment School guru and audiovisual healer Jeffrey Paull, Mike’s teacher and friend. The beautiful painting next to this page and the one on page 107 are by Heather Frise, Mike’s friend and frequent collaborator. The photographs on page 212 are by John Price, Mike’s tennis partner, friend, and collaborator. Mike and I are blessed to be surrounded by truly talented people and even more fortunate to be able to call them friends. Bouquets to Tom McSorley at the Canadian Film Institute, Ben Taylor at Visions, Jesse Brossoit at CFMDC, Wanda vanderStoop at Vtape, and Jorge Lozano, Alexandra Gelis, June Pak, Rebecca Garrett, and soJin Chun at ConverSalón. Thanks to Brian Price and Michael Zryd for their support of the project. Finally, infinite thanks and gratitude to all the writers who contributed to this project; the book would not have happened without you. Mike and I were, literally speaking, shooting for the stars.

Critical Discourse

Book Review: Mike Hoolboom: Work

Jon Petrychyn, “Mike Hoolboom: Work,” Millennium Film Journal 82 (Fall 2025): 44-45.

In one of the more than 100 short reflections that comprise Clint Enns’ monumental Mike Hoolboom: Work, noted experimental film curator Mark McElhattan writes of Hoolboom’s 2015 film Scrapbook: “Some films take a lifetime to watch. I’m still watching Scrapbook.” After finishing Enns’s collection, I felt something similar: some books take a lifetime to read. McElhattan’s rhetorical gesture speaks to the way Scrapbook sticks with you long after watching it. But it is also evocative of the way Hoolboom—a prolific experimental filmmaker with an expansive and varied body of work that spans almost five decades—works and reworks his films and reuses and remixes the sounds and images of others. As Enns notes in his introduction, Hoolboom’s “films are in an ongoing state of transition, often subject to radical revisions and retouches by the filmmaker. Hoolboom is always grappling with new ideas, thinking through images, creating visuals to carry emotions that are too difficult or complicated to resolve in a single viewing.” To understand Hoolboom’s expansive body of work is to take an entire lifetime to watch, rewatch, remix, and reflect. Mike Hoolboom: Work is an indispensable tool in that quest.

Given that a still from the film also serves as the cover image, the book’s alternate title may as well be Mike Hoolboom: Scrapbook. A scrapbook of a hundred different writers tackling a hundred of Hoolboom’s films. A scrapbook of new writing, excerpts of old writing, reflections from and an interview with Hoolboom himself, stills, images, catalogues, dialogues, monologues. McElhattan describes Scrapbook as “a living picture book with a human voice, a memory book.” The same may be said of this volume.

When Enns asked me to review his book, I admitted that I was not as familiar with Hoolboom’s work as I would like to have been, though I eagerly embraced the opportunity to spend some time with what I knew was an expansive and complex body of work. After reading Enns’ collection, it became clear that not only was Hoolboom an incredibly prolific artist, but also one that defied easy categorization and resisted attempts at being consistently legible over time. Some contributors remarked that the film they revisited for their piece seemed to have changed since the last time they viewed it—though was it because the film had changed, or the viewer had? Other contributors, watching their chosen film anew for the first time, felt the film didn’t reflect the person they thought they knew Hoolboom to be. With a body of work so prolific, so varied, and constantly under revision, Mike Hoolboom: Work captures, somewhat paradoxically, the growth and development of Hoolboom’s films over time, but also the films as they exist only in this single moment in time. More synchronic than it is diachronic, the work described in Mike Hoolboom: Work may no longer be the work that you and I watch the next time we return to Hoolbom’s films.

Mike Hoolboom: Work mirrors the form of many of Hoolboom’s own edited collections by other Toronto-based filmmakers, including those on Madi Pillar, Deirdre Logue, b.h. Yael, Richard Fung, and Philip Hoffman, all of whom now return the favor and contribute pieces to Enns’ collection. The book is structured as a series of short reflections on individual films, organized in reverse chronological order. The first half of the book is devoted to the more than 90 films Hoolboom produced between 2015 and 2025—as many as he produced in the preceding 35 years. In dealing with such a short but prolific time in Hoolboom’s career, this first half of the book has a certain stream of consciousness quality that reflects the feverish pace with which Hoolboom has been producing work. But as the book continues to move backwards through to the first three decades of his almost five-decade career, the pieces become more languid, more disparate. You get a stronger sense of the boundaries between each of his films, about their distinct differences and modes of production. Episodic more than narrative, Enns’ collection resists providing a singular image of Hoolboom the filmmaker. Instead, different Hoolbooms emerge: the Hoolboom who made urgent films about HIV, the poor student Hoolboom whose films delighted and confused his professors, the punk Hoolboom making scrappy work at The Funnel, the writer Hoolboom publishing written work almost as prolifically as he was producing films, the confessional Hoolboom, the portrait- artist Hoolboom, the activist Hoolboom.

Given the breakneck speed with which Hoolboom has been producing and exhibiting work and its centrality to the development of experimental cinema, it may be surprising that this text is the first monograph devoted entirely to him. However, in his 1993 article “ABCs of the Canon” (which Enns reprints near the end of the collection), Hoolboom asks: “What does it mean to be part of a canon of experimental film? To be at the centre of a marginal practice?” Some thirty years later, Mike Hoolboom: Work doesn’t provide a clear answer to the questions, though perhaps a clue is in Enns’ title: to be at the centre of experimental cinema is to work.