You might expect a local queer filmmaker to be out and about this week feasting on the smorgasbord of films and videos screening thru May 30 as part of the 20th anniversary edition of the InsideOut Festival. Not Mike Hoolboom. I found him earlier this afternoon sequestered in a dark editing suite at Trinity Square Video where he’s hard at work on his next project.
Hoolboom’s sad celebration of the life of his friend Mark Karbusicky screens at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre Thursday (5:30 pm), its second local film festival showing in a month. With luck, this week’s InsideOut screening of Mark won’t be quite as funereal as the movie’s premier at Hot Docs in April.
“That was very sombre,” recalls Hoolboom. “It really felt like Mark was there in the room. There were people there from every part of his life, people who knew him as a teenager, or knew him as a kid in Burlington, friends of his parents. It was heavy.”
Karbusicky, above, was a filmmaker and political activist who committed suicide in 2007. Mark’s death shook his friends and family to the core because it was so utterly unexpected. “Mark’s death came as an incredible surprise,” says Hoolboom, “not only to me but to everyone around him. He presented himself as someone who was very capable, he always knew what to do, he was always helping everyone else. He was the one you would turn to when you needed some help. How could he be the one who required assistance?”
Because of his interest in film, Karbusicky and his partner Mirah-Soleil Ross, below, frequently videotaped their life together, the happy and dramatic moments as well as the mundane. That rich and varied legacy meant Hoolboom had a trove of material with which to work.
“It’s not unusual for people to have pictures of themselves as kids,” notes Hoolboom, “but Mark and Mirah had amazing footage of him as an adult. There’s an extraordinary moment where they’re both walking in the forest; Mira is behind the camera and Mark’s sitting on a log, his face is drenched in shadow and he just looks so terribly sad. Mira zooms in so you really see him and his feelings, it’s such a private moment, so intimate. I think it’s very unusual that as adults we would have these kinds of moments captured on videotape.”
Mark represents Hoolboom’s attempt to come to terms with the loss of his friend. “I really didn’t set out with a goal,” he says of his film. “I didn’t know what people were going to say before they said it. I didn’t know who was going to be in the movie. I was reluctant to talk to people or to bring the camera into their apartments and houses because I didn’t know some of them very well. Recording them meant somehow having to add their sadness to my sadness. When they would talk they’d be crying and I’d be behind the camera crying, it wasn’t something I looked forward to.”
With Mark, Hoolboom marries two seemingly incompatible genres, the biography and the found-footage movie, to create something that’s greater than the sum of its parts. It’s work that he clearly loves in his quiet, introspective way.
“I’d rather make films than see them or even show them,” he tells me as I prepare to leave him alone again, in the dark. “This is the best part.”
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