Date: 30 October 2004 | Season: London Film Festival 2004 | Tags: London Film Festival
PUBLIC LIGHTING
Saturday 30 October 2004, at 7pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3
Mike Hoolboom, Public Lighting, Canada, 2004, 76 min
Public Lighting is a meditation on photography and the creation of images that can capture, replace and outlive our experiences. It’s a videofilm in seven parts, related in both subject and sentiment to the wonderful Imitations of Life, which screened in last year’s festival. Each chapter is a case study of the different types of personality that have been identified by the young author who guides us through the prologue. The first, a gay male, takes us on a tour of the bars and restaurants where his affairs have ended, recounting ironic stories of his many lovers. An homage to composer Philip Glass is incongruously followed by ‘Hey Madonna’, a confessional letter to the singer from a fan who is HIV positive. Amy celebrates another birthday, but concedes that she has lost her memory to television. At least she has a camera: ‘I take pictures not to help me remember, but to record my forgetting.’ Hiro lives life at a distance, rarely venturing out beyond the lens, and an anxious young model recounts poignant events from her past. Few film-makers use re-appropriated footage in such an emotive way: At once humorous and incisive, these chains of images inevitably lead us back to parts of ourselves. Hoolboom’s recent work is in such profound sympathy with the human condition that it speaks directly to our hearts.
PROGRAMME NOTES
PUBLIC LIGHTING
Saturday 30 October 2004, at 7pm
London National Film Theatre NFT3
PUBLIC LIGHTING
Mike Hoolboom, Canada, 2004, FORMAT, COLOUR, SOUND, 76 min
“How do we tell the story of a life? What cruel reduction of an image will stand (in the obituary, the family photo album, the memory of friends) for the years between a grave and a difficult birth? Public Lighting examines the current media obsession with biography, offering up “the six different kinds of personality” (the obsessive, the narcissist) as case studies, miniatures, possible examples.” (Mike Hoolboom)
“Mike Hoolboom puts together some disparate clips, some beautiful images and hesitant shots from family, fiction, reality archive and advertising films (the Japanese advertisement for an all-purpose cleaning fabric is hilarious). Some images have been found or borrowed while others are original and have been shot for the purposes of the film. In the images there are also words, uttered in short sentences, and the voices of men and women. But this is only half the story. The filmmaker uses a dual approach to images and sounds to construct his unique universe. On the one hand, he gives them depth by slowdown effects, fade-ins and fade-outs, solarization, intermingling of visuals and sound in a complex dramatisation relationship. Public Lighting thus consists of strong images that show us the ages of history, its moments of grandeur and shame, touching on the public and private spheres, mingling show-biz and intimacy. An image in a Hoolboom film is always multiple, a confusing palimpsest that is embedded at a certain point in a different image, a pagan icon that keeps trace of the movement of a body, the expression of a face, the inflection of a voice. On the other hand, although this magnificently impure film is based on a very elaborate editing rhetoric, its profound movement leads to uninterrupted mediation.
“Public Lighting consists of six portraits which a young writes announces at the beginning of the film. These six people tell of ordinary follies, narcissistic obsessions, demiurgic desires and wounded memories. The separated man, the obstinate pianist, the ageing singer, the Chinese émigré, the nocturnal Japanese and the confessed woman are fragments of a collective history. The warm lighting used by Mike Hoolboom illuminates sleepless nights when one is no longer prepared to be deceived – at least for a while – by the ghostly apparitions that haunt our dreams. A single image then appears to emerge. That of a poetic intelligence worried about the world, in which the grave and lucid Hoolboomian hero aspires to some recognition, to a semblance of eternity and to a ‘genuine’ place in the movement of life.”
(Jean Perret, Visions du Reel Catalogue)
Back to top
