“Hoolboom’s most recent film transcribes the history of the body as a moving image/object. From Chaplin’s portrayal of the worker as caught in the wheel of industry, to the rapid-fire representation of skin over skin, this is a body legitimated by light.” Pleasure Dome

“Mike Hoolboom is the most energetic figure of the recent generation of Canadian filmmakers. His film, Modern Times, is like a little essay on what happens to the human body when it meets a movie camera. Modern Times synthesizes, for the first time, the two concerns which have driven most of Hoolboom’s previous work: questions of the cinema (the body of film history), and questions of the maker (the body of the maker). Modern Times begins and ends in darkness” just like any film screening. At the beginning there is only a voice. A child listens to a war veteran’s story. The veteran tells of how he shot people not with a gun, but with a camera. At the end of the film the camera moves towards a drawer which it enters. The drawer closes. The drawer is a closed little black box, like the camera” a box without light. In appropriated images from an old Charlie Chaplin movie, we see Chaplin caught within the mechanism of a machine. He is drawn along a path similar to that of a movie camera, implying that the camera is not neutral, that we end up living inside the machine and seeing the world as the machine sees it.” Martin Rumsby