Date: 18 September 2002 | Season: Infinite Projection
TOM, A STOLEN BIOGRAPHY
Wednesday 18 September 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
Crystalline glances at the life of notorious gay cineaste Tom Chomont told through a symphony of stolen footage. Chomont recounts his artistic and personal history, shadowed by his battle with AIDS and Parkinson’s Disease, while Hoolboom weaves the visual tapestry. Tom is biography told as if a dream, unconsciously drifting between private and collective experience.
Mike Hoolboom, Tom, 2002, 75 min
PROGRAMME NOTES
TOM, A STOLEN BIOGRAPHY
Wednesday 18 September 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
TOM, A STOLEN BIOGRAPHY
Mike Hoolboom, Canada, 2002, video, colour, sound, 75 min
“Tom is an ‘experimental’ feature-length documentary made almost entirely of found footage. This is cinema as deja vu, or deja voodoo; many moments will feel all too familiar, though they’ve been projected now onto the surface of a life to make up this most unusual of biographies. The history of a city, New York City, the most photographed city in the world, operates as a backdrop for the life of Tom Chomont, a key member of the New York underground, a notorious video artist, AIDS sufferer, raconteur. His fantastical stories punctuate the weave of pictures, and a rare white light which he imagines as both the beginning and end of all life. As the decades roll past, excerpts from hundreds of films, some archival documents, some well known Hollywood moments, stream past in a hypnotic rush offering a subject whose skin is cinema, whose flesh and blood has been re-made into the picture plane.
“This portrait is strained thru a history of pictures which come to inhabit their subject, this Tom, this once human. These pictures have taken hold of their subject and reshaped him, moments from a thousand movies have become his life and imagination, the possibility of love. This portrait teases these pictures out of his skin and the skin of his New York City, whose secret histories merge at last with the memories of one of its most underground citizens.
“From his mouth a confession: living is also grieving, an act accomplished in the theatre of sadomasochism where he can return to the memory of his brother, sleeping with his brother’s lovers as he once slept with him, the forbidden apple of his family’s eye, the man closer to him than any other.
“This is the society of the spectacle rewritten as biography, shooting the individual through the vanishing point until there is nothing left but masks, a face which appears as pictures and the memory of tears.”
(Mike Hoolboom, 2002)
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