Video

We Make Couples

Mike Hoolboom

2016, 57:00 minutes, b&w, English

TAPECODE 566.29

This Marxist love story asks: could the couple also be a form of resistance? Essay notes on marriage, microcinema, and the art of projection. With guest appearances by Occupy, Pussy Riot protesters, a runaway goat, two poodles, an army of street marchers, Mos Def, Frankenstein and cinema’s first kiss.

“In Mike Hoolboom’s work, the relationship between images and text (the eternal voice-over) always of a poetic order. In addition, images are used freely – the montage follows the logic of association of ideas, combining material captured by the filmmaker and taken from many other sources. The freedom of these films makes them special because they subvert the narrative logic of the cinema, concentrating on exploring images and concepts that come from the movement generated by the montage itself. In the case of We Make Couples the images and text are inspired by the monogamous model of western societies and linked to capitalism, proposing a revolt or some resistance from “the couple.” However, as might be expected, this relationship of resistance also encompasses the cinema, or rather “amateur cinema” produced by ordinary people outside the industrial machine. For Hoolboom, cinema is life. In this blend of register, the film even includes protesters from the Occupy Movement and Pussy Riot.” Daniel Ribas, Vilo do Conde Festival

"
We Make Couples is a master documentary maker’s six-years-in-the-making Marxist love story. Crammed full of thoughts on cinema, politics and the pleasures and costs of our collective stabs at happiness, it’s a powerful film challenging us to ask whether ‘the couple’ could also be a form of resistance."- International Film Festival Rotterdam

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