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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, who was diagnosed with AIDS. The story, based on the experience of one of Hoolboom's friends at People With AIDS, is shown in a split-screen format with interspersed scenes from popular culture, gay pornography, and human creation. Frank's Cock was critically acclaimed and won several awards, including Best Canadian Short Film at the 1994 Toronto International Film Festival.

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. However, he is also 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. 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; Hoolboom also became "fascinated with a body of parts spliced and spliced again", experimenting with "interruptive rhythms" as a way to reexamine simple acts.

Films regarding AIDS had developed later in Canada than in the United States, where the epidemic had reached the cultural conciousness; the first Canadian AIDS documentary, Nik Sheehan's No Sad Songs, had appeared in 1985.

Hoolboom eventually joined the People With AIDS (PWA) group in Vancouver, where he had been diagnosed. At PWA, Hoolboom befriended a man named Joey whose partner was dying of AIDS. Upon Joey'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 which showed the patient's friends abandoning him. Joey was unwilling to appear in the film, but Rennie – at that time a relative unknown – agreed to provide the monologue. Hoolboom was pleased with the results, writing that Rennie presented the monologue "he'd been living this story all along."

The film was shot in colour 16 mm film using optical sound. The majority of the technical work, including direction, cinematography, and editing, was handled by Hoolboom, while Alex Mackenzie produced. In screenings it was later marketed as an "extremely explicit" experimental film. Production was completed by early 1993.

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 one person 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; this includes excerpts from Madonna's 1992 song "Erotica". The effect, which had been drawn from R. Bruce Elder's The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1979), 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". 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".

Reception

Cole calls Frank's Cock an "extraordinary experimental documentary" that is "as bold as the title implies" and a strong proponent for the widespread dissemination of short films. The film scholar Thomas Waugh, writing about Hoolboom's AIDS activism through his films, describes Frank's Cock as one of a "great AIDS triptych", together with Hoolboom's later works Letters from Home (1996) and Positiv; he notes that audiences often cried at screenings. Rusholme describes Frank's Cock as Hoolboom's "most explicit AIDS narrative". The Canadian film scholar Darell Varga writes that the film is an "emotionally riveting" eulogy to the loss of love.

Frank's Cock won several awards at film festivals, both in Canada and abroad. At the 1994 Toronto International Film Festival it won Best Canadian Short Film; When accepting the award at TIFF, Hoolboom quipped "Frank's Cock has never seemed so large", while Waugh suggests that the title "caused more embarassment than mirth". 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 it receiving 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.

References

Footnotes

  1. TIFF, Mike Hoolboom.
  2. Lacey 1998, Portrait of the Filmmaker.
  3. ^ Waugh 2006, p. 315.
  4. ^ de Bruyn 1993, What He Said.
  5. Waugh 2006, p. 280.
  6. ^ Hoolboom, Frank's Cock.
  7. ^ Cole 2003/2004, From Frank's Cock.
  8. Hoolboom, Credits.
  9. Waugh 2006, p. 316.
  10. ^ TIFF, Frank's Cock.
  11. ^ Kashmere 2008, Regeneration.
  12. Varga 2001, p. 87.
  13. Rush and Baughman 1997, Introduction.
  14. ^ Rusholme 1994, How to Die.
  15. Waugh 2002, p. 417.
  16. Varga 2001, p. 86.
  17. Everett-Green 1995, A Pauper Prince.
  18. Waugh 2006, p. 331.
  19. AA Film Fest, Frank's Cock.
  20. CFMDC, Frank's Cock.
  21. Reinke & Henricks 1997, p. 67.
  22. Hoolboom 1997, Three Scripts.

Bibliography

External links

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