Art Practice

Wednesday, October 21, 7 pm  FREE!
Mike Hoolboom in person!
Public Lighting
(Mike Hoolboom, 2004, Canada, 76 minutes, BetaSP)
“Public Lighting consists of six portraits which a young writer 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 aging 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 Réel Catalogue. The screening will be introduced by video artist Mike Hoolboom.

Friday, October 23, 7 pm  FREE!
Mike Hoolboom in person!
Imitations of Life
(Mike Hoolboom, 2003, Canada, 75 minutes, BetaSP)
“Mike Hoolboom's latest work is an extraordinary palimpsest in action. It is packed with cinema images that interpenetrate, fertilize and repel one another. Taken from Hollywood fiction films but also from newsreels and documentary and scientific works, all these images patiently collected against the background of a salutary hold-up (the scenes are excised without any particular precaution from the gigantic body of cinema films, and by extension from the myths that they convey) have something of the construction of a metafilm. This is both a situationist commentary, through the playful and iconoclastic way in which the works concerned are diverted, and at the same time a Sisyphean attempt to get another story to emerge from this magma of images.” –Jean Perret, Visions du Réel Festival. The screening will be introduced by video artist Mike Hoolboom. Please note that parking on the Northwestern University lot will not be available from 5:30 to 9:30 pm on Friday, October 23, due to Northwestern's Homecoming Parade.

Friday, November 6, 10 pm
Cool It Carol!
(Pete Walker, 1971, U.K., 121 minutes, 35mm)
“A beautiful thing happened throughout the world in the late sixties and early seventies, the censorious bluenoses who policed popular culture, making the world safe for mediocrity, began to lose their grip on the throttle. Free expression flourished. In the realm of British film the loosening of restrictions largely resulted in a lot of sexually and formally juvenile movies like Confessions of a Window Cleaner and I’m Not Feeling Myself Tonight. But amidst this stupidity, a man named Pete Walker had set up shop. He produced films that had a lot more of the maturity and assurance of the best American and continental product. Cool It Carol! is a terrific movie about a young couple who come to London and are intoxicated by the bright lights and easy virtue. Soon the two have embarked on a voyage of sexual discovery both together and apart.” —Adapted from Lars Nilsen of The Alamo Drafthouse, on Cool It Carol! Showing as part of a double feature with Anna Biller's Viva.

The Northwestern University Department of Art Theory and Practice has provided generous funding for these events.