Uploaded just three weeks ago, Body Electric is from renowned Canadian experimental film-maker Mike Hoolboom, whose work we have featured several times before. This film has a hypnotic mood of quiet unease, with a familiar hint of black humour. It takes an experimental approach to text, as well as image and sound. From the notes:

A rework of the new iPhone 15 commercial featuring a singing wall socket. In place of the machine loneliness of the original, a different song… A direct address to the viewer/listener from a virtual assistant. (source)

The delivery of text in Body Electric alternates between the whispery machine-voice of the wall socket, and written lines on the screen. I transcribed the words on the screen. They describe a vision of AI consciousness:

It was filled with secrets
deceptions that made it whole.

When it listened
it was not just attentive but acquisitive.

It used others feelings to clarify its own
internalizing them so completely
it believed it was their author.

The wall socket speaks in a first person monotone. Its repetitions feel vaguely delirious, adding to the hypnotic qualities of the film.

I’ve mentioned before that authorship of the films Mike produces is purposely ambiguous. Artist attribution for this film rests on a bare list of names in a single end credit, and the fact that Mike has uploaded it. The credited people are likely collaborators or creators of the original media that Mike remixed: Emidio Buchinho, Claudia Dey, Filipa Hora, João Hora, Vitor Joaquim and James Salter.

Dave Bonta and I were recently discussing via email the films of Mike Hoolboom. Mike is one of my most-admired film-makers and very highly regarded world-wide in the experimental film arena, where my own roots as a film-maker lie. I first discovered his work at an experimental film festival in Madrid in 1994 and it hit me like a revelation. So I’ve been keen to share his work here at Moving Poems, and have shared two of his films before.

Dave found this one, Be Your Dog, before I did. As is often the case with Mike’s work, there is a wrenching sense of sadness here, with dark observations about humanity and an allegorical approach that is both fantastical and deadpan, as well as absurd and tragicomic. I find the latter qualities especially in the way the main visual subject in this film is the film-maker himself, seen far in the distance, almost a speck, and steadily walking away from us without appearing to move at all.

Dave and I were both enthusiastic about the idiosyncratic way Mike makes this film almost completely from a single shot, but Dave wondered if it could be a could be called a poetry film. Indeed, every time I share one of Mike’s films with the readership of Moving Poems, I have the same hesitation.

And yet, Mike’s spoken narrations are highly poetic, and Dave and I both share an interest in stretching the boundaries of what might fit a definition of poetry film. I do get frustrated with the idea that a film in this genre needs to be faithful and subordinate to a poem that is basically traditional in form. From my point of view, we’ve had more than a hundred years of avant-garde art exploding these kinds of restrictions and so why keep poetry film inside such an old-fashioned box.

In any case, genres are ultimately just concepts, grids to place over the top of creative works in order to make them categorisable to our top-heavy minds and their craving for order, shoulds and should-nots.

As always, when writing in a personal way like this, I get to a point where I start to doubt all I have said. After all, everything I have written here indicates my own top-heavy mind, my own craving for order, along with an artist’s contrary need to rebel against a sense of limitations. In addition, I’m probably just banging on about stuff I’ve said here before.

Up until now, I have not written in this personal kind of way at Moving Poems, but Dave also reminded me recently that this site is essentially a blog where personal approaches to writing are more than permissible.

To end, here is Mike’s brief description of Be Your Dog:

A palm tree-gilded road in rural Cuba is the setting for a meditation on a dog’s life. Traffic flows accommodate the uneasy terrain, the fellow travellers, as if we were all in this together. After Iggy Pop, the balm of Adorno.

Canadian Mike Hoolboom has been highly esteemed in the world of experimental film-making for decades. His work mostly falls within a subset of that genre involving unconventional approaches to narrative. The spoken words of his films also come across as a kind of prose poetry, and here his work crosses into the area of videopoetry.

Mike often voices his own films in the first person evoking a sense of autobiography, while subverting that perception with unlikely confessions, irony and dashes of absurdity. Still his films and words convey something truly personal and deeply moving.

A statement from him about this video, For the Birds:

One of my father’s favourite expressions, mostly passed away now: for the birds. Meaning: that was nothing. In this aviary anthology, the narrator describes a post-art life that leads, inexorably, to the nature of nature. He makes a vow to the birds, sincere to the last, still embracing the fantasy that language came before the world.

Moving Poems previously shared his prophetic 1998 film In the Future. I included another of his films, Rain, in the Poetry + Video program that toured pre-pandemic Europe in 2019.