Mike Hoolboom

The Pacific Cinematheque Monograph Series was initiated to explore the spectrum of contributions and innovations of Western Canadian filmmakers, videomakers, and fringe media artists. Monograph Number One focuses, fittingly, on David Rimmer, one of Canada's foremost experimental filmmakers. There is no better way to start off Pacific Cinémathèque's Monograph Series, celebrating West Coast filmmakers, than with the work of David Rimmer. Mike Hoolboom's essay tantalizes us with a romantic myth that contextualizes David, while Alex MacKenzie's interview lets the artist speak for himself. Both offer a unique insight into the art practice of one of the most influential Canadian filmmakers of the 20th century. - Ann Marie Fleming, independent filmmaker and visual artist The most exciting non-narrative film I've ever seen ... images become polarized into grainy outlines, like drawings in white or colored chalk which gradually disintegrate and disappear. The film [Variations on a Cellophane Wrapper] resembles a painting floating through time, its subject disappearing and re-emerging in various degrees of abstraction. - Kristina Nordstrom, The Village Voice

Legendary Canadian filmmaker Frank Cole entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the first man to cross the Sahara on foot. Meticulous, fearless, obsessive, and the maker of at least two bonafide masterpieces, there has never been anything in the cinema like Frank Cole. His murder in Mali left us with a legacy of two features, a pair of award-winning short films and a mystery that may never be solved. This book is a ravishing odyssey of inner and outer visions, a heaven-sent trove of first-person experiences and critical vantages. It features never-before-seen material from the filmmaker himself, including colour postcards, photographs and excerpts from a journal made during his Sahara crossings. Here, more than a dozen international luminaries weigh in on the Canadian legend, alongside Korbett Matthews' award-winning documentary The Man Who Crossed the Sahara.

Auden flees the small town of Capreol for Toronto, bewildered, HIV positive, and in search of an entirely new personality. He falls in love with orgy maestro Wrik, mainly because the old Auden would never even have talked to him. And through Wrik, he meets Steve Reinke, his new best friend. Steve -- and here's where it gets confusing -- is, in real life as well as in The Steve Machine, a renowned video artist, someone who makes television for one person at a time, small-screen excursions designed to cure arthritis or night blindness. Despite being a virtuoso with video, however, Steve is not so good with love. He falls for a football star, and, with his medium-is-the-message videotapes, is able to slow down the other players so his beau can run past them all at normal speed. Though the team wins, Steve does not, and the jock dumps him. Then there's the chess whiz, followed soon after by hustlers and tattoo artists, and and then Jody, who's got a mouth so big and red that Steve is overcome with lust. Truth is, it's a mouth used to settling scores, only Steve doesn't catch this. Blinded by passion, our fictional Steve contracts HIV, then sets to work building a videotape that will relieve him, and the millions of others afflicted, of their illness. On the way, he stars in a reality TV show, decides to wear only white paper suits, and meets childhood idol Yoko Ono. Auden accompanies Steve in this quest that is at once a plague narrative, a love story, a reflection on media technology, and a joy to read. As an added bonus, this volume has been written both as a regular hold-in-your-hand novel with a beginning, middle, and end (though not necessarily in that order), and as a machine designed to replace the voice of the inner monologue with something (or someone) far more soothing and satisfying. Like the videotapes of Steve Reinke, the book itself is a machine. The Steve Machine.