Practical Dreamers: Conversations with Movie Artists

(Paperback)

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'The streets are full of admirable craftsmen, but so few practical dreamers.' Man Ray

What if there were movies made the same way as suits, custom fitted, each one tailored for one person Not broadcast, but narrowcast Not theatres around the world showing the same globalized pictures, but instead a local circumstance, a movie so particular, so peculiar, it could cure night blindness or vertigo

Welcome to the world of fringe movies, where artists have been busy putting queer shoulders to the wheels, or bending light to talk about First Nations rights (and making it funny at the same time), or demonstrating how a personality can be taken apart and put together again, all in the course of a ten-minute movie which might take years to make.

Practical Dreamers takes us to this other side of the media plantation. In it, twenty-seven Canadian artists dish about how they get it done and why it matters. The conversations are personal, up close and jargon free, smart without smarting. The stellar cast includes smartbomb Steve Reinke; visionary Peter Mettler; Middle East specialist Jayce Salloum; queer Asian avatars Richard Fung, Midi Onodera, Ho Tam, and Wayne Yung; footage recyclers Aleesa Cohene and Jubal Brown; overhead projector king Daniel Barrow; First Nations vets Kent Monkman and Shelley Niro; international art presence Paulette Philips; and documentarian Donigan Cumming.

These in-depth talks come lavishly illustrated in an oversized volume.

Reviews

"The streets are full of admirable craftsmen, but so few practical dreamers." - Man Ray "Hoolboom has...enriched the potential for understanding this medium - in particular the work of these artists - by engaging in conversations with them that sound as if they were lifted out of the notebook of a wise psychoanalyst. The interviewer asks intelligent questions, but doesn't impose himself on the subject. There is an implicit trust and freedom between author and interviewee, which releases the words and ideas off the page and into the reader's imagination." - The Globe and Mail"

Author Bio

Mike Hoolboom is a film and video artist. He is the author of two books: Plague Years and Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film in Canada. He is a founding member of the Pleasure Dome screening collective and has worked as the artistic director of the Images Festival and as the experimental film coordinator at Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. The winner of more than thirty international prizes, he has exhibited his work at the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou, and major festivals around the world. He has enjoyed nine retrospectives of his work, most recently in Buenos Aires.