Lacan Palestine
Director Mike Hoolboom
Countries Canada
Duration 70 min
Synopsis
“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.” Mining a wealth of material from TV news, documentary, fiction, and fantasy film, Lacan Palestine is a visual roller-coaster, with Hoolboom using cinema to suggest Palestine as a place of recurring psychological-colonial-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 title suggests, this is more than a mere collage.
“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.” Mining a wealth of material from TV news, documentary, fiction, and fantasy film, Lacan Palestine is a visual roller-coaster, with Hoolboom using cinema to suggest Palestine as a place of recurring psychological-colonial-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 title suggests, this is more than a mere collage.