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''Frank's Cock'' has received warm critical reviews, both in Canada and abroad. Cole calls it an "extraordinary experimental documentary" that is "as bold as the title implies" and a strong argument for the widespread dissemination of short films.{{sfn|Cole 2003/2004, From Frank's Cock}} Waugh places ''Frank's Cock'' as one of a "great AIDS triptych", together with Hoolboom's later works '']'' (1996) and ''Positiv''.{{sfn|Waugh|2002|p=417}} The Canadian film scholar Darell Varga writes that the film is an "emotionally riveting" eulogy to the loss of love.{{sfn|Varga|2001|p=86}} ''Frank's Cock'' has received warm critical reviews, both in Canada and abroad. Cole calls it an "extraordinary experimental documentary" that is "as bold as the title implies" and a strong argument for the widespread dissemination of short films.{{sfn|Cole 2003/2004, From Frank's Cock}} Waugh places ''Frank's Cock'' as one of a "great AIDS triptych", together with Hoolboom's later works '']'' (1996) and ''Positiv''.{{sfn|Waugh|2002|p=417}} The Canadian film scholar Darell Varga writes that the film is an "emotionally riveting" eulogy to the loss of love.{{sfn|Varga|2001|p=86}}


Reviewing after a preview for the ]n independent film magazine ''In the Picture'', James Twentyman wrote that the film was "relatively straightforward" but strong and provocative, emphasising the "soul-bearing" nature of the monologue.{{sfn|Twentyman|1994|p=18}} Rush and Baughman write that the short took the narrative voice beyond what is mainstream, demonstrating "the power of word and image",{{sfn|Rush and Baughman 1997, Introduction}} while Rusholme describes ''Frank's Cock'' as Hoolboom's "most explicit AIDS narrative".{{sfn|Rusholme 1994, How to Die}} The Swiss film festival Viper touts the short as expressing, humour, and sexual obsession in the face of a plague.{{sfn|Viper|1995|p=35}} Reviewing after a preview for the ]n independent film magazine ''In the Picture'', James Twentyman wrote that the film was "relatively straightforward" but strong and provocative, emphasising the "soul-bearing" nature of the monologue.{{sfn|Twentyman|1994|p=18}} Rush and Baughman write that the short took the narrative voice beyond what is mainstream, demonstrating "the power of word and image",{{sfn|Rush and Baughman 1997, Introduction}} while Rusholme describes ''Frank's Cock'' as Hoolboom's "most explicit AIDS narrative".{{sfn|Rusholme 1994, How to Die}} The Swiss film festival Viper touts the short as expressing, humour, and sexual obsession in the face of a plague.{{sfn|Viper|1995|p=35}}


Hoolboom has stated that he felt the film was accessible to both gay or straight audiences, which he hoped would "open them up to differences of form and why would make something formally different."{{sfn|Bunbury 1994, Hollywood and Other Canadas}} Waugh suggests that this was successful, as in his experience audiences often cried at screenings.{{sfn|Waugh|2002|p=417}} Hoolboom has stated that he felt the film was accessible to both gay or straight audiences, which he hoped would "open them up to differences of form and why would make something formally different."{{sfn|Bunbury 1994, Hollywood and Other Canadas}} Waugh suggests that this was successful, as in his experience audiences often cried at screenings.{{sfn|Waugh|2002|p=417}}


==Legacy== ==Legacy==
''Frank's Cock'' won several awards at domestic and international film festivals. At the 1994 ] it won Best Canadian Short Film;{{sfn|TIFF, Frank's Cock}} it was cited for its "evocative images, ... impeccable writing and mise-en-scene, moving depiction of the universal human experiences of love and loss in the age of AIDS".{{sfn|Hoolboom, Frank's Cock}} The selection included ]5,000 in prize money.{{sfn|Lacey 1998, Portrait of the Filmmaker}} When accepting the award, Hoolboom quipped "''Frank's Cock'' has never seemed so large".{{sfn|Everett-Green 1995, A Pauper Prince}} Waugh suggests that the title "caused more embarrassment than mirth" when it was read during the citation.{{sfn|Waugh|2006|p=331}} ''Frank's Cock'' won several awards at domestic and international film festivals. At the 1994 ] it won the NFB-John Spotton Award, given for the best Canadian short film. The jury cited ''Frank's Cock'' for its "evocative images, ... impeccable writing and mise en scene, ... moving depiction of the universal human
experiences of love and loss in the age of AIDS, and especially for its success in shaking our preconceptions".{{sfn|Harris 1994, Festival Prize}} The selection included ]2,500 in prize money and a further C$2,500 worth of ]. When accepting the award, Hoolboom quipped "''Frank's Cock'' has never seemed so large".{{sfn|Everett-Green 1995, A Pauper Prince}} Waugh suggests that the title "caused more embarrassment than mirth" when it was read during the citation.{{sfn|Waugh|2006|p=331}} Special citations were also read for Andrew Munger's ''Make Some Noise'' and ]'s ''Technilogic Ordering''.{{sfn|Harris 1994, Festival Prize}}


That year the film won an award at the ] in ], Switzerland.{{sfn|TIFF, Frank's Cock}} At the ] in ], ''Frank's Cock'' won Best Dramatic Film.{{sfn|AA Film Fest, Frank's Cock}} The Canadian Filmmakers' Distribution Centre, which has distribution rights for the film, notes further awards at the Interfilm Festival in ] and at the ] in ] (both 1995),{{sfn|CFMDC, Frank's Cock}} while Hoolboom notes that it received an honourable mention at the ]'s Queer Film Fest (1994).{{sfn|Hoolboom, Frank's Cock}} That year the film won an award at the ] in ], Switzerland.{{sfn|TIFF, Frank's Cock}} At the ] in ], ''Frank's Cock'' won Best Dramatic Film.{{sfn|AA Film Fest, Frank's Cock}} The Canadian Filmmakers' Distribution Centre, which has distribution rights for the film, notes further awards at the Interfilm Festival in ] and at the ] in ] (both 1995),{{sfn|CFMDC, Frank's Cock}} while Hoolboom notes that it received an honourable mention at the ]'s Queer Film Fest (1994).{{sfn|Hoolboom, Frank's Cock}}
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|work=Globe and Mail |work=Globe and Mail
|date=28 April 1995 |date=28 April 1995
|page=C3
|ref={{sfnRef|Everett-Green 1995, A Pauper Prince}} |ref={{sfnRef|Everett-Green 1995, A Pauper Prince}}
}} }}
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|archiveurl=http://www.webcitation.org/69z7IQMnI |archiveurl=http://www.webcitation.org/69z7IQMnI
|ref={{sfnRef|TIFF, Frank's Cock}} |ref={{sfnRef|TIFF, Frank's Cock}}
}}
*{{cite news
|last=Harris
|first=Christopher
|title=Festival Prize Spells Double Happiness
|work=Globe and Mail
|date=19 September 1994
|ref={{sfnRef|Harris 1994, Festival Prize}}
}} }}
*{{cite web *{{cite web
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*{{IMDb title|0106957|Frank's Cock}} *{{IMDb title|0106957|Frank's Cock}}


{{Use dmy dates|date=August 2012}} {{Use dmy dates|date=October 2012}}
{{Use Canadian English|date=August 2012}} {{Use Canadian English|date=August 2012}}


Revision as of 22:57, 26 October 2012

1993 Canadian film
Frank's Cock
Directed byMike Hoolboom
Written byMike Hoolboom
Screenplay byMike Hoolboom
Produced byAlex Mackenzie
StarringCallum Keith Rennie
Narrated byCallum Keith Rennie
Edited byMike Hoolboom
Release date
  • 1993 (1993) (Canada)
Running time8 minutes
CountryCanada
LanguageEnglish

Frank's Cock is a 1993 Canadian short film directed and written by Mike Hoolboom and produced by Alex Mackenzie. The eight-minute production stars Callum Keith Rennie as an unnamed narrator who discusses his relationship with his partner, Frank. The two met while the narrator was a teenager and spent nearly ten years together. Frank has since been diagnosed with AIDS, and the narrator fears his loss. The story was based on the experience of one of Hoolboom's friends at People With AIDS, which Hoolboom adapted after receiving a grant to create a three-minute film about breaking up.

The work, shot on a low budget, is shown in a split-screen format with interspersed scenes from popular culture, gay pornography, and human creation; this format is meant to symbolise the "fragmentation of the body" experienced by AIDS sufferers. Frank's Cock was critically acclaimed and won several awards, including Best Canadian Short Film at the 1994 Toronto International Film Festival. The script has been republished several times and has inspired another short on AIDS in Canada's native community.

Synopsis

An unnamed narrator (Callum Keith Rennie), who as a teenager intended to be the "Michael Jordan of sex" or "Wayne Gretzky with a hard-on", discusses how he met and fell in love with an older man named Frank, whom he met at a group sex session. The two began an older brother-younger brother fantasy and moved in together. Frank has a voracious sexual appetite and, at times, invites the narrator for whole-day sex sessions. He is a tender lover, teaching his partner how to fly a box kite and cooking omelettes for him. In turn, the narrator is pleased with Frank's attentions and their sexual experimentation, although he is initially confused by Frank's insistence on listening to Peter Gzowski's Morningside during sex. As their ten-year anniversary approaches, Frank – having lost large amounts of weight and developed Kaposi's sarcomas – has been diagnosed with AIDS, leaving the narrator stunned; he concludes the narration with "I'm gonna miss him. He's the best friend I ever had."

Production

The Canadian director Mike Hoolboom was diagnosed with HIV in 1988 or 1989, after going to donate blood. Having previously focused on films about the body, Hoolboom began dealing heavily with HIV/AIDS and situations faced by those with the virus. In a 1993 interview, he stated that he felt himself working harder, finishing films at a more rapid rate because he was uncertain how long he would live. Hoolboom also became "fascinated with a body of parts spliced and spliced again", experimenting with "interruptive rhythms" as a way to reexamine simple acts.

A man looking to the left while holding a glass of beer
Mike Hoolboom, director, writer, and cinematographer of Frank's Cock

Hoolboom eventually joined the People With AIDS (PWA) group in Vancouver, where he had been diagnosed. At PWA, Hoolboom befriended a man (Joey in some sources, Alan in others) whose partner was dying of AIDS. Upon his friend's suggestion, Hoolboom began work on a script for "a real movie" that portrayed an AIDS patient as one full of love and not one that showed the patient's friends abandoning him. The friend was, however, unwilling to appear in the film. In writing the script Hoolboom tried to keep elements of humour; he later said that the humour was necessary as the source had insisted "most of our relationship was incredibly joyous and happy and a good time".

After receiving a grant to make a three-minute film for the Vancouver-based cooperative Cineworks, Hoolboom began working on realising the script with a low budget and limited 16 mm film from the National Film Board of Canada; he was one of seven artists commissioned to "spark local production" with short films on breakup, which were ultimately included in the omnibus Breaking Up. Rennie – at that time a relative unknown – agreed to provide the monologue. Hoolboom was pleased with the results, writing that Rennie presented the monologue as if "he'd been living this story all along." The majority of the technical work, including direction, cinematography, and editing, was handled by Hoolboom; Alex Mackenzie, working for Cineworks, produced the film.

Part of the terms of his grant were that Hoolboom was allowed only one edit. After pondering how to complete the film under such terms, Hoolboom chose to complete the film without any edits. He recorded previously edited footage, some appropriated from various sources, through a hole in a piece of cardboard, producing a single quadrant; he repeated this process three times, using the same film, which resulted in four quadrants with four different images. Production was completed by early 1993. In screenings Frank's Cock was later marketed as an "extremely explicit" experimental film.

Although societal awareness of AIDS had developed at a slower pace in Canada than in the United States, films regarding the disease had appeared nearly concurrently: both the first Canadian documentary and the first American feature-length film on the subject, Nik Sheehan's No Sad Songs and John Erman's An Early Frost respectively, had appeared in 1985. However, the majority of the early gay pioneers with AIDS had died by the time Hoolboom made Frank's Cock; as such, the film scholar Thomas Waugh considers Hoolboom a second-generation figurehead in AIDS activism and one of the earliest not coming from the gay culture community, with the short Hoolboom's first venture at directly addressing the AIDS issue.

Style

A scene from the film, depicting the use of each quadrant; the split screen effect has been described as evoking the physical effects of AIDS.

Frank's Cock divides the screen into quadrants, with the majority of the film focusing on the upper-right corner of the screen. In this panel, Rennie's character gives a monologue, which is sometimes illustrated by images in other panels: the lower-right panel flashes scenes of hardcore gay pornography, the upper-left shows scenes representing mankind's creation, while the lower-left flashes excerpts from popular art. Aside from the original footage of Rennie, the short appropriated clips the Nova episode "The Miracle of Life", the gay film The Best of Blondes, and the music video for Madonna's 1992 song "Erotica". The effect was later reused in Hoolboom's 1997 short Positiv.

Janis Cole, writing for POV magazine, describes the split-screen effect as supporting the text while "creating an optical treatment purposefully grounded in both dream and reality", as elements show out of sync. Jeff Rush and Cynthia Baughman, writing in the Journal of Film and Video, describe the film as showing that "text can reverse the traditional balance of words = abstractions/images = the concrete" through the creation of vivid, perhaps disturbing, word pictures which serve as tangible images contrasted with the faint abstractions which are the actual images. Jack Rusholme, prefacing a retrospective of Hoolboom's works by Experimenta Media Arts, writes that the split-screen evokes the effects of AIDS, in which "the body broken into dispersed vantages", while the narration serves to "bind with words what this disease will render lifeless and inert". In a 1994 interview, Hoolboom stated that his intent was to represent the "fragmentation of the body" experienced by AIDS sufferers.

Reception

Frank's Cock has received warm critical reviews, both in Canada and abroad. Cole calls it an "extraordinary experimental documentary" that is "as bold as the title implies" and a strong argument for the widespread dissemination of short films. Waugh places Frank's Cock as one of a "great AIDS triptych", together with Hoolboom's later works Letters from Home (1996) and Positiv. The Canadian film scholar Darell Varga writes that the film is an "emotionally riveting" eulogy to the loss of love.

Reviewing after a preview for the Western Australian independent film magazine In the Picture, James Twentyman wrote that the film was "relatively straightforward" but strong and provocative, emphasising the "soul-bearing" nature of the monologue. Rush and Baughman write that the short took the narrative voice beyond what is mainstream, demonstrating "the power of word and image", while Rusholme describes Frank's Cock as Hoolboom's "most explicit AIDS narrative". The Swiss film festival Viper touts the short as expressing, humour, and sexual obsession in the face of a plague.

Hoolboom has stated that he felt the film was accessible to both gay or straight audiences, which he hoped would "open them up to differences of form and why would make something formally different." Waugh suggests that this was successful, as in his experience audiences often cried at screenings.

Legacy

Frank's Cock won several awards at domestic and international film festivals. At the 1994 Toronto International Film Festival it won the NFB-John Spotton Award, given for the best Canadian short film. The jury cited Frank's Cock for its "evocative images, ... impeccable writing and mise en scene, ... moving depiction of the universal human experiences of love and loss in the age of AIDS, and especially for its success in shaking our preconceptions". The selection included C$2,500 in prize money and a further C$2,500 worth of film processing. When accepting the award, Hoolboom quipped "Frank's Cock has never seemed so large". Waugh suggests that the title "caused more embarrassment than mirth" when it was read during the citation. Special citations were also read for Andrew Munger's Make Some Noise and Philip Hoffman's Technilogic Ordering.

That year the film won an award at the Locarno International Film Festival in Locarno, Switzerland. At the Ann Arbor Film Festival in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Frank's Cock won Best Dramatic Film. The Canadian Filmmakers' Distribution Centre, which has distribution rights for the film, notes further awards at the Interfilm Festival in Berlin and at the Big Muddy Film Festival in Carbondale, Illinois (both 1995), while Hoolboom notes that it received an honourable mention at the University of Oregon's Queer Film Fest (1994).

The script for Frank's Cock has been published several times, including in the script anthology By the Skin of Their Tongues and in the Journal of Film and Video (both 1997). The film served as an influence for Adam Garnet Jones' Secret Weapons (2008), commissioned by the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre in celebration of its fortieth anniversary. However, unlike Frank's Cock, Secret Weapons focused on an LGBT identity within Canada's native community.

Notes

  1. ^ Bunbury 1994, Hollywood and Other Canadas.
  2. TIFF, Mike Hoolboom.
  3. ^ Lacey 1998, Portrait of the Filmmaker.
  4. ^ Waugh 2006, p. 315.
  5. ^ de Bruyn 1993, What He Said.
  6. ^ Waugh 2006, p. 316.
  7. ^ Hoolboom, Frank's Cock.
  8. Cineworks, Breaking Up.
  9. ^ Cole 2003/2004, From Frank's Cock.
  10. Hoolboom, Credits.
  11. Cineworks, Omnibus.
  12. Waugh 2006, p. 280.
  13. Hartl 2012, How Hollywood portrays AIDS.
  14. ^ TIFF, Frank's Cock.
  15. ^ Viper 1995, p. 35.
  16. Varga 2001, p. 87.
  17. ^ Rush and Baughman 1997, Introduction.
  18. ^ Rusholme 1994, How to Die.
  19. ^ Waugh 2002, p. 417.
  20. Varga 2001, p. 86.
  21. Twentyman 1994, p. 18.
  22. ^ Harris 1994, Festival Prize.
  23. Everett-Green 1995, A Pauper Prince.
  24. Waugh 2006, p. 331.
  25. AA Film Fest, Frank's Cock.
  26. CFMDC, Frank's Cock.
  27. Reinke & Henricks 1997, p. 67.
  28. Hoolboom 1997, Three Scripts.
  29. Kashmere 2008, Regeneration.

References

External links

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