[Fdu] Lacan Palestine (Nov 24 @ Beit Zatoun)

[Cynthia Wright]

Film: Lacan Palestine
Mike Hoolboom in attendance
Sponsored by QuAIA and Beit Zatoun

Saturday, November 24, 2012

7:00pm – 9:30pm

at Beit Zatoun, 612 Markham Street


Fresh from screenings in Vienna, Jihlava, Montreal and Paris, Pleasure Dome presents the Toronto premiere of Mike Hoolboom’s new feature length essay Lacan Palestine. 

Mining a wealth of material from TV news, documentary, fiction,and fantasy film, Lacan Palestine is a visual rollercoaster, with Hoolboom using cinema to suggest Palestine as a place of recurring colonial/psychological projection a space whose conquest is here spectacularly relived in celluloid waves of armed crusaders, legionnaires, Mongol horsemen, biplanes, and machine guns.

But as the film's title suggests, this is far more than mere collage. Layered, often deeply personal, and frequently challenging, the film intersperses its newsreels, desert fantasias, and historic encounters with oneiric ruminations on subjects from patricide to John Coltrane, and from the elusive nature of joy to what Hoolboom calls the “loveless love story” starring Moses, Abraham, and Jacques Lacan. Dizzying in its technical and conceptual density, Lacan Palestine is incomparable cinema.

“The grand prize goes to Lacan Palestine for its immersion in a complex subject that arrives via a montage that is subtle, sensitive and strong. Its great visual richness emerges from impressive iconographic research. In spite of its diversity of images, this fluid work carries an insistent theme of personal history that makes us identify with a fate or destiny, creating a persistent, high wire hum.”Festival International Signes de Nuit

“A mind boggling achievement by Canadian artist Mike Hoolboom, who has been called ‘the greatest found-footage master of the era.’ Skilfully assembled from existing film material, Hoolboom conjures visual allegories and cut-up counter-narratives around a notion of Palestine as “a land that is not a land.” Dizzying in its technical and conceptual density, Lacan Palestine is truly incomparable cinema.”   Nick Denes, London Palestine Film Festival

“This beautiful experiment is as noble as it is absurd, the intractable struggle continues, and in the midst of this fine searching a single certitude emerges. We are really in front of something that we can call cinema. Its striking intelligence and sudden illuminations confront us with a singular and authentic cinema. In the acrobatic editing, in Hoolboom’s control from the beginning of the film to the end, there is something shining, urgent, burning. There is a nearly blinding dimension to this accumulation of fragments that impels the viewer to re-see the movie as soon as it is finished. To observe again its folding parts, to find the hidden meanings, to meditate again and again on its implications.” (Marcel Jean, 24 Images, no. 159, Oct/Nov 2012)
 
All proceeds generously donated by Mike Hoolboom and Pleasure Dome to "Sustain Beit Zatoun Fund"

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Need to know:
- Doors open at 6:45
- $8 / $5 Members or Students
- Accessible on demand via portable ramp; washrooms not accessible

Tasty refreshments (non-alcoholic) and Zatoun oliveoil+za'atar dipping.  
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