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Letters from Home (film)

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Letters from Home
Directed byMike Hoolboom
Written by
Screenplay byMike Hoolboom
Produced byMike Hoolboom
Cinematography
  • Mike Hoolboom
  • Steve Sanguedolce
Edited byMike Hoolboom
Music byEarle Peach
Release date
  • 1996 (1996) (Canada)
Running time
15 minutes
CountryCanada
LanguageEnglish

Letters from Home is a 15-minute-long short film by Canadian director Mike Hoolboom. It follows a multitude of figures from the Toronto art community who deliver messages about living with AIDS, which are spliced with home videos, found and archive footage, and other film techniques. Letters from Home was generally well received and won several awards, including Best Canadian Short Film at the 1996 Toronto International Film Festival.

Synopsis

After an initial voiceover following a dream in which the narrator chases a Cadbury chocolate bar until he sees a masked doctor who tells him he has AIDS, a woman tells of her friend who, when using a half-fare card, was told that she could not possibly be AIDS positive as she would have to be home dying. Director Mike Hoolboom's face fades in from a watery background, speaking of how he is not dying and the government is not working to save him.[1]

Several actors and actresses deliver thoughts, first regarding maltreatment of AIDS patients by the general public, then comparing living with AIDS to fighting World War II and describing the treatment. The film then notes the work that is being done, interspersed with footage of two men kissing, but indicates that there is not enough support. It closes with Callum Keith Rennie relating how love can overcome the fear felt by AIDS victims.[1]

Cast

Callum Keith Rennie had previously worked with Hoolboom on Frank's Cock in 1993.[2]

Production

Letters from Home was based on a 1988 speech by Vito Russo.

The film's narration was primarily based on the speech "Why We Fight" by the LGBT rights activist Vito Russo, which was delivered at a protest in 1988 which Hoolboom attended. It features bits written by Hoolboom itself.[3][1][4] The majority of actors and actresses are from Toronto, where Hoolboom had established himself; they came from a variety of racial, generational, and gender backgrounds.[5] At the time of release, combined antiretroviral therapy was unavailable.[4]

Letters from Home was shot on 16 mm film and has a run length of 15 minutes. It intersperses found footage with archive footage, home movies, hand-processed work, and original material.[1][6] This footage includes material from Hoolboom's past, as well as archived footage of aircraft crashes, and a stuck car.[7] It also features Billie Holiday's 1958 cover of "You've Changed", Leonard Cohen's "Waiting for a Miracle", and references to Hermann Hesse's 1927 novel Steppenwolf.[4]

Style

Janice Cole, writing in Point of View, describes the film's narration style as "part story, part confessional and part spokesperson".[3] The American media theorist Laura Marks writes that Hoolboom's multi-narrator approach allows the viewer a greater opportunity to empathise with AIDS patients; she writes that it is a more appropriate approach to the issue than "the heroic narrative centering on an individual's suffering" present in other works.[7] In another publication she notes that the film shows a paradox of "having a body that is yours but not", as exemplified by the opening scene.[8]

Roger Hallas, director of the LGBT Studies Program at Syracuse University, writes that Letters from Home is based on esthetics of "fragmentation and dispersal", emphasising the multicultural cast and camera work, which varies from "talking head" close-ups to voice overs.[9] He notes the strength of the reuse of Russo's speech, in which the activist emphasised survival before dying in 1990, with the words having been refactored to show the need to both live with AIDS and to remember those who had died of the disease.[10]

Reception

Cole praised the film, writing that lines such as "If I'm dying of anything it's the way you look at me. It's from the harsh cleanser you put on the toilet after I've used it" were highly powerful, emphasising that the general populace generally lacks knowledge on AIDS; she also noted the criticism of misinformation.[3] A writer from the Visions du Réel film festival in Nyon, Switzerland, noted Letters from Home as showing Hoolboom's expertise in "captivat[ing] his audience" through the personal approach used.[11] Tom McSorley, writing in Take One, found the film "achingly personal" with a "cogent, courageous rendering" of an awareness that death awaits everyone.[12]

The film scholar Thomas Waugh, writing about Hoolboom's AIDS activism through his films, describes Letters from Home as one of a "great AIDS triptych", together with Hoolboom's earlier work Frank's Cock (1993) and the later clip Positiv; he notes that audiences often cried at screenings.[13] Hallas writes that the film "exemplifies" the use of archival footage by LGBT media to "bear witness to the exigencies of AIDS" in modern times.[14]

Not all reviews were positive. The filmmaker Bart Testa gave a scathing review, describing Hoolboom as a "magpie montagist" like Bonnie Sherr Klein with "dial-a-stylistic" touches found throughout the short.[15]

The short was shown at numerous film festivals, both in Canada and abroad. At the 1996 Toronto International Film Festival, it won Best Canadian Short Film;[16] the judges remarked that it had "stunning vision and intensely moving testimony of life in the age of AIDS".[6] The film also received two awards at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in Oberhausen, Germany.[16]

In 2010 Letters from Home was released as part of a two-disc DVD set of films and testimonials related to HIV/AIDS. Released by the Université du Québec à Montréal and subtitled by Waugh, the film was paired with Esther Vasquette's Le Récit d'A.[17]

References

Footnotes

  1. ^ a b c d Hoolboom, Script.
  2. ^ TIFF, Frank's Cock.
  3. ^ a b c Cole 2003/2004, From Frank's Cock.
  4. ^ a b c Hallas 2009, p. 27.
  5. ^ Waugh 2002, p. 421.
  6. ^ a b Hoolboom, Letters from Home.
  7. ^ a b Marks 2002, p. 99.
  8. ^ Marks 1997, p. 95.
  9. ^ Hallas 2009, p. 28.
  10. ^ Hallas 2009, p. 29.
  11. ^ Visions du Réel 1997, Mike Hoolboom.
  12. ^ McSorley 1997, Short Takes.
  13. ^ Waugh 2002, p. 417.
  14. ^ Hallas 2009, p. 30.
  15. ^ Waugh 2002, pp. 426–427.
  16. ^ a b TIFF, Letters from Home.
  17. ^ Mensah & Gauvin 2010, p. 51.

Bibliography

  • Cole, Janis (Winter 2003–2004). "From Frank's Cock to Imitations of Life: Ten Years With Mike Hoolboom". Point of View. No. 54. Documentary Organization of Canada. Archived from the original on 4 January 2013. Retrieved 16 August 2012.
  • "Frank's Cock". Canadian Film Encyclopedia. Toronto International Film Festival. Archived from the original on 22 February 2013. Retrieved 17 August 2012.
  • Hallas, Roger (2009). Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-4601-2.
  • Hoolboom, Mike. "Letters from Home Description". Official Website. Archived from the original on 28 January 2013. Retrieved 20 August 2012.
  • Hoolboom, Mike. "Script". Official Website. Archived from the original on 28 January 2013. Retrieved 20 August 2012.
  • Marks, Laura U. (2002). Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-3889-5.
  • Marks, Laura U. (1997). "Loving a Disappearing Image" (PDF). Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies. 8 (1–2). Montreal: University of Montreal: 93–111. Archived from the original on 5 March 2012. Retrieved 20 August 2012.
  • McIntosh, Andrew. "Letters from Home". Canadian Film Encyclopedia. Toronto International Film Festival. Archived from the original on 22 February 2013. Retrieved 20 August 2012.
  • McSorley, Tom (22 March 1997). "Short Takes (Letters from home; Not Kokura; Lodela; One day I stood still)". Take One. Archived from the original on 9 April 2016. (subscription required)
  • Mensah, Maria Nengeh; Gauvin, Marie-Eve, eds. (2010). M'entendez-vous? Journée d'étude sur la culture du témoignage de la séropositivité au VIH au Québec [Can You Hear Me? A Journey of Study on the Cultural Testimony of HIV Patients in Quebec] (PDF) (in French). Montreal: Université du Québec à Montréal. Archived from the original (PDF) on 4 March 2012.
  • "Mike Hoolboom" (PDF). Visions du Réel. 1997. p. 3. Archived from the original (PDF) on 20 August 2012. Retrieved 20 August 2012.
  • Waugh, Thomas (2002). "Mike Hoolboom and the Second Generation of AIDS Films in Canada". In Beard, William; White, Jerry (eds.). North of everything : English-Canadian cinema since 1980. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. pp. 416–429. ISBN 978-0-88864-390-2.
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