Year: 2002
Language: English
Format: Digital Betacam (NTSC) Colour
Runtime: 70 min
Director: Mike Hoolboom
Producer: Mike Hoolboom
Cinematographer: Mike Hoolboom, Caspar Stracke
Editor: Mark Karbusicky
Cast: Tom Chomont

After working primarily in film for fifteen years, Mike Hoolboom, one of Canada’s most prolific and celebrated experimental filmmakers, turned to video and began exploring its potential for new modes of storytelling. The result, Tom, is a skilfully crafted and unconventional documentary about New York experimental filmmaker Tom Chomont.

Tom is almost entirely constructed from found and appropriated footage. Clips from home movies, mainstream Hollywood cinema and archival films meld seamlessly with new material to drive this unusual biography. The appropriated images – familiar, yet estranged from their original contexts – are repositioned to illustrate the story of Tom’s life. Scenes stream past, decades roll by and hundreds of films collide in a hypnotic rush. Chomont, a notorious video artist and key member of the New York underground, now battles Parkinson’s disease and AIDS. Against the backdrop of New York City, this raconteur extraordinaire relates stories of infanticide, a mobster’s love, incest, S&M, fetishism and a rare white light which he imagines as both the beginning and end of all life.

More than simply a biopic or documentary, Tom is a celebration of cinema and friendship – a dialogue between filmmakers. Hoolboom’s own images mix and meld with those he has begged, borrowed and stolen. These are punctuated with excerpts from many of Chomont’s own works, ranging from 1968's Phases of the Moon to such nineties films as Sadistic Self Portrait and Head Shot. Animated by hauntingly beautiful sound design, Tom is a deeply evocative portrait of a life lived through art. It was named one of Canada’s Top Ten of 2002 by an independent, national panel comprised of filmmakers, programmers, journalists and industry professionals.