{"id":1175,"date":"2003-11-01T21:00:00","date_gmt":"2003-11-01T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/?p=1175"},"modified":"2018-01-25T15:00:18","modified_gmt":"2018-01-25T15:00:18","slug":"imitations-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/2003\/11\/01\/imitations-of-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Imitations of Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

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IMITATIONS OF LIFE
\n<\/b>Saturday 1 November 2003, at 9pm
\n<\/b>London National Film Theatre NFT3<\/b><\/p>\n

Mike Hoolboom, Imitations of Life, Canada, 2003, 75 min
\n<\/b>A series of topical news headlines sound like it might as well be the end of the world, but this is 1993, the year the filmmakers\u2019 nephew was born. It\u2019s an event that leads him to contemplate the ceaseless urge to photograph and be photographed. For Hoolboom, this compulsion indicates our discontentment with the world, which is compensated by reproducing it as \u2018experience in a crisis-proof form\u2019. Imitations of Life<\/i> is a 10-part suite of dreams and memories that integrates original footage with instantly recognisable images from commercials, cinema classics and recent blockbusters. In Jack\u2019s early years, the filmmaker sees (and shows us) the world through a child\u2019s eyes. Later, this sense of open wonder is retained, though tempered in the knowledge that modern life doesn\u2019t permit us such indulgence. We are \u2018the children of Fritz Lang and Microsoft\u2019, striving to give our lives shape and meaning through photographs, tv and movies. Through a vast wealth of adopted images, this video questions the values of lives lived through the lens. If movies carry our collective baggage and teach us about the world around us, do they hold us back from inventing the future?<\/p>\n

Also Screening: Saturday 25 October 2003, at 8:30pm, London ICA2<\/i><\/p>\nPROGRAMME NOTES<\/a>

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IMITATIONS OF LIFE
\nMike Hoolboom, Canada, 2003, video, colour, sound, 75 min
\n<\/b>Expanding on the structure of Panic Bodies<\/i>, with its discrete but interconnected shorts, the latest found-footage feature from Mike Hoolboom is a ten-part meditation on childhood, visual representation and the future in a world of pictures. Breathtaking in its encyclopaedic recycling and appropriation, the film moves beyond scratch video, assemblage and recontextualisation; in Hoolboom\u2019s words it \u201cstrains childhood through a history of reproduction, culling pictures from the Lumi\u00e8res to the present day in order to find the future in the past.\u201d Much more than just a poetic essay on mediation and simulation at the end of history, the film situates the ethical challenges of the future within the context of picture making, pointing to our current crisis as one of (a failure of) imagination, representation and technology.<\/p>\n

Already acclaimed as a short in its own right, Jack<\/i> works as the heart of the film, with Hoolboom\u2019s familiar, wryly wise voice-over recounting visits with his nephew as we witness Jack growing up in processed Bolex images. Here we see possibility, for Jack makes happiness his profession and ponders if politics could ever be an expression of love.<\/p>\n

Throughout the film, the presence of childhood, whether in pictures, voice, story, or reflection, forces us adults to rethink our responsibility, imagination, apocalyptic terrors and the formation of our own memories. The title section itself, proposes science fiction as a species of film haunted by science, obsessed with death and always about catastrophe. With visuals weaving together Riefenstahl, Terminator<\/i> and many more familiar images, it leaves us with the challenge of how we will invent the future. \u2014Ken Anderlini, Vancouver International Film Festival, 2003<\/p>\n

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Alina Rudnitskaya\u2019s humanistic approach to documentary filmmaking often brings out the humour in her chosen subjects. As an introduction to her work, this programme depicts three diverse groups of contemporary Russian women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-1175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-london-film-festival-2003","tag-london-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1175\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}