In my car.

Directed, written and produced by Mike Hoolboom. 5 min. 1998.

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), Fellini's 8 1/2 and Tarkovsky's Stalker. 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.