“Drawing on sources from Warhol to Derrida, the voice-over monologue is an entertaining and thoughtful commentary on the aural component of cinema, on language, movie-watching and production economics. The visual poverty of White Museum is, paradoxically, the means by which Hoolboom creates a powerful analysis of the cinematic image.” Katie Russell, Now Magazine

“Taking Snow's conceptual rigour to another level, Mike Hoolboom's Guy Debord and Warhol inspired White Museum is a virtually imageless and infinitely witty meditation on cinema.” Andréa Picard

“Equally personal, if more confrontational and philosophical, is Mike Hoolboom's White Museum, which confounds our cinematic expectations with a white screen overlaid with first person ruminations. Hoolboom in fact only gives us one image to look at but his narration forces us to confront the experience of cinema in a highly stimulating manner.” Geoff Pevere, Festival of Festivals Catalogue

“White Museum is a 35 minute audio piece with 33 minutes of clear leader tape. In some hands, that could mean a fatal tour into the land of self-indulgence, but Hoolboom manages to make of his cinema without images an engaging, squatter's eye view of the critical landscape. Hoolboom's anecdotal voice-over floats over a soundtrack collage of pop-culture effluvia, television ads and snippets of rock music. His musings on film, the word, and the work-load of trees often resemble a cerebral stand-up routine, built on the conviction that the best thing to do when someone floats a critical balloon is to have a hat-pin ready. Early in the film, he apologizes for the visual tedium (”I just don't have enough money for the images”) and mulls over ad hoc ways of alleviating it. Actually, he did find the money to make one image, he says—and I'm saving it for later.

Waiting for the image becomes part of the experience of watching (or not watching) White Museum. Mixed in with Hoolboom's comic asides are the more sober utterances of his own critical gods: Barthes, Derrida, Godard and (perhaps most significantly) Borges. For Hoolboom, the place to look for the most potent magic of cinema lies at the threshold of sight, just before the image is reached. He rhapsodizes the blank leader tape, and even the experience of lining up outside the movie theatre. “Never getting in is the most exciting,” he decides. After that, waiting to get in is the most exciting... The film ultimately vaults well beyond the level of audio-visual scrapbook in the closing image: a slow-zooming shot of the sun shining through a stand of trees. The deeply moving, magisterial effect of this simple image owes as much to Hoolboom's careful preparations as to Mozart's accompanying Kyrie.” Robert Everett Green, Globe and Mail