{"id":3324,"date":"2002-09-18T19:30:57","date_gmt":"2002-09-18T18:30:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/?p=3324"},"modified":"2018-01-25T15:01:00","modified_gmt":"2018-01-25T15:01:00","slug":"tom-a-stolen-biography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/2002\/09\/18\/tom-a-stolen-biography\/","title":{"rendered":"Tom, a Stolen Biography"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: center;\">ngg_shortcode_0_placeholder<\/p>\n<p><strong>TOM<em>, <\/em>A STOLEN BIOGRAPHY<br \/>\n<\/strong><strong> Wednesday 18 September 2002, at 7:30pm<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong> London The Photographers&#8217; Gallery<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s Disease, while Hoolboom weaves the visual tapestry. <em>Tom <\/em>is biography told as if a dream, unconsciously drifting between private and collective experience.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Mike Hoolboom, Tom, 2002, 75 min<\/strong><\/p>\n<a onclick=\"wpex_toggle(889930289, 'PROGRAMME NOTES', 'Read less'); return false;\" class=\"wpex-link\" id=\"wpexlink889930289\" href=\"#\">PROGRAMME NOTES<\/a><div class=\"wpex_div\" id=\"wpex889930289\" style=\"display: none;\"><\/p>\n<p><strong>TOM<em>, <\/em>A STOLEN BIOGRAPHY<br \/>\n<\/strong> Wednesday 18 September 2002, at 7:30pm<br \/>\nLondon The Photographers&#8217; Gallery<\/p>\n<p><strong>TOM<em>, <\/em>A STOLEN BIOGRAPHY<br \/>\n<\/strong> <strong>Mike Hoolboom, Canada, 2002, video, colour, sound, 75 min<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cTom<\/em> is an \u2018experimental\u2019 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\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis 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.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFrom 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\u2019s lovers as he once slept with him, the forbidden apple of his family\u2019s eye, the man closer to him than any other.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>(Mike Hoolboom, 2002)<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#top\">Back to top<\/a><\/p>\n<p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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":[110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-infinite-projection"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3324","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=3324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3324\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}