Originally made at Charles Street Video in 1998, recut in 2018 at home. Part six of the nine-part feature Imitations of Life (2003).

“In My Car tells of a young boy who is sent off to live in the family car. The boy is challenged to a street race by the devil who gains power by absorbing the boy’s emotions. Only when remembering his older brother’s death in a fiery car accident and being overcome by the need to mourn is the boy able to conquer the devil. But for all his deceit, the devil envisioned by Hoolboom is a force that inspires creativity, whose death is therefore a ‘tragedy for the imagination.’” Mark Scala, Frist Museum

A poem wrapped around a brightly filmed portrait of childhood tells of a life spent in cars and a last race with the devil.

“In My Car bring together images from music videos, Hollywood blockbusters, European art cinema and commercial television. By recontextualizing them, Hoolboom changes their meaning and invites their audience to meditate on what grounds the individual and collective conscience.” Light Cone

“Shakespeare stole. Cervantes plundered. T.S. Eliot once remarked that mediocre artists borrow, great artists steal. Later in the 20th century, the idea of theft became theorized, valorized and championed as ‘postmodern pastiche.’ So where does this place Mike Hoolboom? His latest effort, In My Car, is a montage of stolen images, sequences and music from the 1987 international anthology film Aria (Ken Russell, Derek Jarman, Jean-Luc Godard, et al). Loosely assembled out of scenes of a car theft by a little boy who is pursued by police (or is it the devil?), a car crash, a church and kids watching television, the film's obscure narrative concoction is made both more dense and more clear as Hoolboom has his own poem scroll across the screen. The poetic text explores, in its tale of a dying brother, ideas of memory, faith, technology, solitude and imagination. Haunting, elegiac and almost tangibly melancholy, In My Car is a short, devastating journey. With his thievery and his originality, perhaps Hoolboom has fashioned a premillennial, media-saturated visual vocabulary of our dying century. At the very least, in this concise fusion of soul and form where theft has become both the disease and its cure, Hoolboom has made the real Crash.” Tom McSorley