Film Format: 16mm

  • Arabic Numeral Series – Arabic 11

    This series of films, each extraordinarily unique from every other (except “0 + 10” going together) is inspired and governed by strata of the mind’s moving-visual-thinking different from that of the “Roman Numeral Series” or perhaps one should say that the Arabic Numerals come to fruition thru some tree-of nerves separate from that which gave birth to the Romans (as it is physiologically deceptive to think of thought as existing in “layers”). The Arabics range in length from approximately 5 min. to 32 min. and may be projected at 24 fps as well as 18, tho’ the latter speed seems…

  • Hot Pepper

    “Hot Pepper” plunges the viewer deep into the music of Clifton Chenier and its sources in the surroundings of rural and urban Louisiana. The great French accordionist mixes rock and blues with his unique version of Zydeco music, a pulsating combination of Cajun French with African undertones. In addition to scenes of Clifton belting it out at sweaty dance halls, the film winds his music through the bayous and byways of the countryside and into the streets and homes of his people.

  • House Movie

    “House Movie” is a direct autobiography, with events interpreted as they were in progress. It is about living intimately with another person, in a rented house which never becomes home, due to an unavoidable separation. At times the camera almost takes the point of view of the architecture, as witness to the kind of transient emotions common to houses like this. Using a Rachmaninoff excerpt, the film is edited symphonically, with theme and subordinate theme, development and re-capitulation, echoed in the recurring visual motifs and rhythmic cutting. “The extravagant camera movement that marks ‘House Movie’ is not so much lyrical…

  • House of Pain

    “A bold and startling work filled with images at once beautiful and profoundly disturbing, the film is a hybrid of DeSade, Dali and Bataille, a nightmare that takes place somewhere between sleep and death. A profound testament of the body at its limits, whose fantastical vantages lend the body a rare grace… Leave the inner child at home.” – Bill Evans, Metro Cinema “The Canadian avant-garde has found its Salo, and its name is ‘House of Pain.’ Prolific, hugely talented Toronto/Vancouver/Toronto experimental filmmaker Mike Hoolboom’s new feature must be the most transgressive Canadian film ever made. Shot in black-and-white and…

  • How the Hell Are You?

    Based on a correspondence with a gay friend in the sixties, this collage film is a portrait of a person and a decade. Against a montage of found images, the narrator comments on life, love, and the American Dream.

  • How To: Festoon

    “How To: Festoon” is where my life as a filmmaker intersects with my job as a conveyor belt salesman. Three years ago, financial need and family obligation forced me to work in my family business – selling conveyor belts. Just as each of us is comprised of many different layers of experiences, “How To: Festoon” is comprised of two layers of film that form my identity. The first layer is a structurally organized account of a Limestone Quarry in which rock from a cliff is collected by a huge tractor and dump truck and processed into small pebbles on a…

  • Huey Lewis and the News: Be-Fore!

    “Huey Lewis and the News: Be-Fore!” follows one of the world’s top rock-and-roll bands of the 80s and a crew of fifty technicians to the Bahamas for the making of a music video for their number one hit single, “Stuck With You” for their album, “FORE!” Blank takes us behind-the-scenes for an off-beat look at what happens when a song is transformed into visuals and musicians are transformed into actors. Hidden in the straightforward reportage are sly comments on the MTV machine, sexism in the media, and the business of rock-and-roll. Best of all, Huey Lewis and the News maintain…

  • Human on My Faithless Arm

    Winner of Honourable Mention (Experimental) at the 1987 Canadian Student Film Festival/Montreal International Film Festival, “Human on My Faithless Arm” shatters the common stereotype of the deaf. The main character, remaining nameless throughout, has rejected “the institution of the deaf” only to find herself, years later, rejected by society. In this multi-dimensional portrait of an individual trapped between self and self-image, issues of sexuality and economics are questioned. This film is an exploration of alienation through techniques of superimposition, sound displacement ,and deconstruction/reconstruction of language, exposing the hearing-impaired women’s comprehension of sound and conversation. “‘Human on My Faithless Arm’ is…

  • Hybrid

    “‘Hybrid’ shows, in near-documentary fashion, the planting of flowers crosscut with a looming military presence viewed in photographs. This polarity of life and death, still and motion, courses throughout the film until its final eruption into colour drafts between a war-scarred generation of Vietnamese children and a flowering London stalk. A defiantly personal response to a war whose images haunted the public imagery of the 60s, ‘Hybrid’ stands in answer to any who feel an irreconcilable divide between art and politics…” – Mike Hoolboom “The Vietnam War was very upsetting to me: I did not agree with the American presence…

  • Arabic Numeral Series – Arabic 12

    This series of films, each extraordinarily unique from every other (except “0 + 10” going together) is inspired and governed by strata of the mind’s moving-visual-thinking different from that of the “Roman Numeral Series” or perhaps one should say that the Arabic Numerals come to fruition thru some tree-of nerves separate from that which gave birth to the Romans (as it is physiologically deceptive to think of thought as existing in “layers”). The Arabics range in length from approximately 5 min. to 32 min. and may be projected at 24 fps as well as 18, tho’ the latter speed seems…