Travelling with Mike Hoolboom and Steve Sanguedolce
By Niliema Karkhanis 1994
Mike Hoolboom and Steve Sanguedolce, two Toronto based filmmakers have a critique of colonialism and occupation of places in history. Their version is built out of their travels through Mexico. Unlike a more traditionally fashioned politicized, NFB-style, Canadian documentary (such as the phenomenal work of Alanis Obomsawin), theirs is one entirely devoid of key actors, actions and events. Mexico is a series of disjointed filmic snapshots, edited together, with a reminiscent and poetic voiceover from Hoolboom. It is a characterless relational portrait of (you) a critical westerner’s journey through a NAFTA country. “Who am I here?” it asks.
Many of Hoolboom’s films deal with his concerns about perversion, body, death, illness and their driving nostalgias. Mexico has little in it about the subjective experiences of awry bodies – although there is an element of this physicality with the second person engagement of the narrative. Nostalgia underlies this text as an ever-present expression of movement, memory and identity; it is these underground Canadian filmmakers’ essay about regional experience, identity and context. Sanguedolce and Hoolboom’s essay/visual poetry does not mobilize notions of “the poor native” or “the exploitative capitalist”. Instead, the film engages the viewer as a participant, a travelling ‘you’ whose experience of sight-seeing are about identity, self, social and political experience. For Sanguedolce and Hoolboom, travelling is a kind of cultural displacement: when ‘you’ go ‘you’ bring all that ‘you’ know with ‘you’ and ‘you’ visit what developers from ‘your’ world (in this case, Toronto) have left behind; when ‘you’ return home, it is as if ‘you’ never left.
Mexico dwells upon the elusiveness of boundaries. Hoolboom and Sanguedolce bring their world to this world. Their document is not based in objectivity and accuracy in an empirical sense. It is a phenomenological telling of how they (the filmmakers) become defined through their travels in a world they know little about, but is at the same time ever-so-familiar – because home (the colonial west) precedes and follows their adventure.
At night you stand on the balcony of the hotel and look out into Malinalco, at a thousand other buildings that look just the same as your own. All the Canadian hotels are built here, in the centre of the city, each building illuminating the face of the next. You think: this architecture is a uniform for travelers, an image of home. Here, beneath the shower heads of North American plumbing, the body’s machines of hearing and seeing may be raised to an understanding of excellence. You turn out the lights thinking that this holiday is also home (Hoolboom 1998: 92).[1]
What Hoolboom and Sanguedolce do most effectively is make explicit the relationship between any traveler (whether academic or quotidian) and the cultural encounter. For them, this is most poignantly elucidated without any cultural other, but by the othering of themselves: the travelers, the documentarians, the displaced members of a colonial world. They pare the work down to context, and eliminate ‘characters’; instead they send postcards about the heartbreak, landscape and sunstroke of traveling in a neocolonial world.
[1] This is a transcription of a section from Mexico taken from a recent book of Hoolboom’s texts, reviews of his films and ponderings on his career. The book is called Plague Years: A Life in Underground Movies and is a tribute to Hoolboom’s career thus far.