Imitations of Life (2003), Mike Hoolboom
Imitation of Life is Mike Hoolboom's film on visual culture, its birth, the present and the impending future. Broken down into nine parts, each addresses the representations in media and how they influence our view on the future. The Canadian avant-garde filmmaker conveyed his thoughts on the issue through an assembly of found footage, edited popular music as well as voice-over narrative. The
film is calming and moving, the voice narrating about the memories and experience of childhood and our obsession and fear of death and annihilation made viewers melancholic.
Hoolboom appropriated clips from Hollywood films to recreate his own narratives, questioning how these mainstream images gradually replace our ideals of life. While majority of Hollywood films manipulate emotions of viewers through the strong story telling, Hoolboom's film seems to work the opposite. The editing of compositions along with the sounds evoke feelings of melancholy of the spectators, causing them to recall their own childhood experiences, reflect on our collective dreams and imagination.
"It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess. Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were, but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused. In these periods of arousal, the childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge; they were formed at that time. And a number of motives, with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming them, as well as in the selection of the memories themselves." Sigmund Freud
Jack
A series of scandalous headlines that seemed so shocking at the time, however it was not the end of the world, but 1993 the year Jack, the nephew of the filmmaker was born. Hoolboom went own to pondered over the culture of photography, the urge to document every moment regardless of their significance. Hoolboom referred to Jacques Lacan's theory of the mirror stage which states that when a child looks into the mirror for the first time, literally or figuratively, the realization that they are seeing themselves causes them great confusion, it's the first identity conflict people have. He went on stating that Jack's mirror stage is a reflection in itself, as he looked into the lens of the camera. Hoolboom showed us the world seen through the eyes of a child in the beginning, the sense of wonder and endless possibilities of what could be the future. However in the modern age, we gradually lose such ability just like Jack asking his uncle if he will even be able to remember anything without his camera.
"June 98", each date entry of this short documentary was written with a left hand, presumable the non dominant hand of the author. Was he referring to the time when we first picked up a pencil, when we first started learning about the world? Or indicating that, just like how he did not have full control over his handwriting, we do not always write our lives the way we intended to. While some of those dreams remain, they have been tempered with as we have always been guided by the culture of society and dependent on the ever evolving technology.
Hoolboom revealed that Jack showed him the veil that separated their worlds, his of routine and commonplace and Jack's world of dreams. Hollywood and other mainstream film has become our collective memory, shaping our worldview, planting certain ideals in our subconscious. However the image of the future we get, mostly from science fiction films often are apocalyptic or dystopic as he mentioned in "Science Fiction". Have the images fed to us by mass media, the photos, TV and movies which we live by held us back from inventing the future as he said? Thinking about it now, it has been a while since mankind invented or discovered something that makes us look forward to the future, instead we reminisce the past when things seems easier as it is easier to look back at the images of the past we captured than to form new ones of the future.
Imitation of Life Script: http://mikehoolboom.com/?p=800
Comments