A 10-parts experimental movie 'Imitations of Life' by Mike Hoolboom is a variation on the topic of photo & video representation of our lives, are they able to replace real experiences, do they help to remember or just distract us from the most important moments. The debate had started from Sontags' 'On Photography' and continues to contemporary digital era, when images seem to rule the world. The film is perceived as a demonstration of the authors' personal archive: home videos, commercials, movies than has been extracted from the author's shelf. Experimental art is initially a type of art that is different from traditional. In the extreme understanding of the concept, stand the denial or confrontation with the set laws and rules of production. In order to break them, one has to know them. That is why it is not relevant to call experimental art as something that promotes low standards, is shallow or is simply a nonsense.
I have chosen the second part of the movie which is called 'Jack'. This part made me think about the idea of 'distracted perception', which is also stressed by some replicas of small Jack and can be better explained by this extract:
“Jack says technology is the knack of arranging the world so that we don’t have to experience it, that the change we call progress is just another obstacle to joy and that stories have no point unless they absorb our terror. Jack tells me life swarms with innocent monsters”
There is no linear narration in this part of the movie, even though the are check-points in a form of special dates mentioned by the narrator. There are characters, but they have no voice. No consistent visual style: monochrome replaced with sepia, than replaced with colours; quality varies from high to grainy and blurry; most-likely, the range of equipment used for the filming was wider than normally is as well. It is possible to trace how the technological progress went on throughout the years of Jack's growing up. Whereas, in the fiction the visual style tends to stay mostly the same throughout the whole piece - trademark, individual style, recognizability.
In terms of editing, the film demonstrate similarly broad variety of tricks. Probably the most obvious is constantly repeating close-ups. By filming his nephew from a very close distance, the director makes the ties between the narration and the picture even stronger. All the words start to be more intimate and creates the imaginary door into the life of the boy. However, sometimes it also created some discomfort, as it gets too close and too often.
Another distinctive feature of the film is that how the author draws parallels between casual moments of child's life with the theoretical knowledge from different spheres, like psychoanalysis, sociology, religion. Its not a typical approach that can be found in fiction: drawing links between sentimental, family moments with some distant and, sometimes unpleasant, concepts, like child's game and apocalypse. By doing this, he creates an illustrative contrast between a new, blooming life and how the camera is able to reproduce it. Such contrast is strengthened by the idea of fragmentation that is present in the short: the episodes of Jack's life are translated with a year gaps - just like the camera is only able to capture random, scarce pieces of the whole. The mere fact that the director had captured some, in his understanding, significant moments, already shows the effect of filtering the reality - we see Jack, but we see him only from the perspective of his uncle.
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