Frank's Cock

The first time I saw the short film Frank's Cock at the now defunct Cinéma Parallèle on Saint-Laurent Boulevard in Montreal, I was so deeply shocked that I have yet to recover from the film’s impact on me. This shock had nothing to do with the title or the provocative content of the film. No, it was rather the incredible force of its raw emotion that took my breath away then - and continues to take my breath away even today. I had just discovered Mike Hoolboom's extraordinary experimental cinema and I have never stopped following his prodigiously prolific work since. In Frank's Cock, he only needs 8 minutes to build, with humour, audacity, and invention, a whole world, that of a true and beautiful love, fiercely and deliciously sexual, but above all joyful and tender even if it is placed in the shadow of AIDS from which the narrator's lover suffers. Splitting the screen in four to symbolically evoke the fragmentation of the body experienced by AIDS patients, the filmmaker juxtaposes the close-up of actor Callum Keith Rennie appearing in the upper right corner with images of a human embryo in gestation, a gay porn film and a Madonna video. Not distracting, surprisingly, these images instead bolster the narrator's words as he speaks in simple, raw language about his lover, what he loves about him and their relationship, and what he will miss after his death. Rarely has such an explicit work elicited reactions so at odds with those one might have expected and, above all, such a deeply moving, intimate, cinematic wonder.

Claire Valade
Critic and programmer