“A vivid and idiosyncratic four-part biopic celebrating the lives of Fats Waller, Jackson Pollock, Janieta Eyre and Frida Kahlo. Three great but long-gone artists (Fats Waller, Jackson Pollock and Frida Kahlo) are exhumed in Mike Hoolboom’s Aftermath, alongside one who’s still very much with us in photographer Janieta Eyre. This four-part biopic is the latest in a string of biographical work from the Canadian filmmaker, which he describes as both ‘grieving machines and celebration marches.’

Hoolboom weaves together a dense array of archive footage, voiceovers, animation and new material he’s shot to create heady and impressionistic audiovisual collages. Each section of Aftermath has a different rhythm and flavour. For the Fats Waller segment, Hoolboom utilizes testimony from Waller’s family as onscreen text and voiceover juxtaposes these memories of the man with images from a wide selection of footage, some new and found, including a brief clip from Hollywood musical Stormy Weather in which Waller appeared. The Pollock section, meanwhile, repurposes Jackson Pollock 51, Hans Namuth’s short documentary showing the abstract expressionist at work.

Aftermath will be the opening film of the eighth edition of Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival in Hawick.” Jamie Dunn, The Skinny

“In this visually stunning and linguistically poetic essay, Mike Hoolboom’s Aftermath raises not only the issue of what constitutes history, but what makes a human being. Hoolboom situates each of his characters inside a web of relations and interactions that often supersede the figure, as if the perimeter of the self had been rubbed away and spread across an entire city. The approach is tangential, episodic, rhapsodic. We meet the jazz pianist Fats Waller and his music in old recordings, but also in new pictures from New York, then we experience Hans Namuth’s 1950s footage of Jackson Pollock creating a drip painting in the landscape. Janieta Eyre’s sensitive and performative border crossings lure us between life and death, and finally we dive into an exuberant and animated mosaic of set pieces as Frida Kahlo fights for survival. Aftermath reflects the cultural characters and signature moods in four successive episodes. Hoolboom’s audiovisual collage is liberally sprinkled with diary excerpts from the artists, summoning a collective artistic spirit which does not conform to the dimensions of a body or even a life span. In the genre of the biopic, Hoolboom has invented a new, experimental-philosophical form.” Kasseler Dokfest

“In his most recent film, the Canadian director experiments with testimonies and archives in a free reconstruction of the biography.” Documentamadrid

A four-part biopic that narrates moments from the lives of Fats Waller, Jackson Pollack, Janieta Eyre and Frida Kahlo. This quartet of hauntologies reframes the cruel reductions of biography to focus on death and doubles. Repurposing archival texts (the diaries of Kahlo, the testimonies of Waller’s kin and familiars) as audiovisual graffiti, old voices are cropped and replayed as intertitles or voice-over fragments, lending a historic charge to images that dream across the present.

“Already our fictitious past has been supplanted in our memories by that other past, of which we now know nothing certain – not even that it is false.” Borges

“Art is a necessity, a life-enhancing force that can enable us to transform repression and personal trauma into creative action. This is powerfully brought to light in Aftermath, through a kaleidoscopic exploration of the lives of four artists.” Alchemy Film Festival

“What gives you the right to love black music, this irruption out of and into catastrophe? How are you justified in claiming these pleasures, in their terribleness, between the impossibility of redress and the marked-up, marked-down, brutally inscribed, visciously discounted remains of the ones who, in spite of every anheroic act of getting over, can’t get over, forming the lost body of our broken bridge?” Fred Moten