Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Sun Creator (talk | contribs) at 14:33, 9 September 2012 (→Reception: clarify). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Frank's Cock is a 1993 Canadian short film directed and written by Mike Hoolboom and produced by Alex Mackenzie. The eight-minute film 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, was 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 move 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 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 – is 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 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. He eventually joined the People With AIDS (PWA) group in Vancouver. 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.

Style

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". 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 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 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. ^ Hoolboom, Frank's Cock.
4. ^ Cole 2003/2004, From Frank's Cock.
5. Hoolboom, Credits.
6. ^ TIFF, Frank's Cock.
7. ^ Kashmere 2008, Regeneration.
8. Varga 2001, p. 87.
9. Rush and Baughman 1997, Introduction.
10. ^ Rusholme 1994, How to Die.
11. Waugh 2002, p. 417.
12. Varga 2001, p. 86.
13. Everett-Green 1995, A Pauper Prince.
14. AA Film Fest, Frank's Cock.
15. Reinke & Henricks 1997, p. 67.
16. Hoolboom 1997, Three Scripts.

Bibliography

• Cole, Janis (Winter 2003/2004). "From Frank's Cock to Imitations of Life: Ten Years With Mike Hoolboom". Point of View. No. 54. Documentary Organization of Canada. Archived from the original on 16 August 2012. Retrieved 16 August 2012. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
• Everett-Green, Robert (28 April 1995). "A Pauper Prince of Underground Film". Globe and Mail.
• "Frank's Cock". Canadian Film Encyclopedia. Toronto International Film Festival. Archived from the original on 17 August 2012. Retrieved 17 August 2012.
• "Frank's Cock". Ann Arbor Film Festival. Archived from the original on 17 August 2012. Retrieved 17 August 2012.
• Hoolboom, Mike. "Credits". Official Website. Archived from the original on 17 August 2012. Retrieved 17 August 2012.
• Hoolboom, Mike. "Frank's Cock description". Official Website. Archived from the original on 17 August 2012. Retrieved 17 August 2012.
• Hoolboom, Mike (1 October 1997). "Three Scripts". Journal of Film and Video. University Film and Video Association. (subscription required)
• Lacey, Liam (10 October 1998). "Portrait of the Filmmaker as a Busy Young Man". Globe and Mail. p. C5.
• "Mike Hoolboom". Canadian Film Encyclopedia. Toronto International Film Festival. Archived from the original on 16 August 2012. Retrieved 16 August 2012.
• Kashmere, Brett (May 2008). "Regeneration". Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 August 2012. Retrieved 24 August 2012.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: year (link)
• Reinke, Steve; Henricks, Nelson, eds. (1997). By the Skin of Their Tongues. Toronto: YYZ Books. ISBN 978-0-920397-20-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Rush, Jeff; Baughman, Cynthia (1 October 1997). "Introduction". Journal of Film and Video. University Film and Video Association. (subscription required)
• Rusholme, Jack (1994). "How to Die: The Films of Mike Hoolboom". Experimenta.org. Experimenta Media Arts. Archived from the original on 20 August 2012.
• Varga, Darell (2001). "Panic Bodies and the Performance of Space". Canadian Journal of Film Studies. 10 (2): 80–101. Archived from the original (PDF) on 17 August 2012. Retrieved 17 August 2012. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Waugh, Thomas (2002). "Mike Hoolboom and the Second Generation of AIDS Films in Canada". In Beard, William; White, Jerry (eds.). North of everything : English-Canadian cinema since 1980. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. pp. 416–429. ISBN 978-0-88864-390-2. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

External links

• Script at Mike Hoolboom's Official Website
• Frank's Cock at IMDb

• 1993 films
• Use dmy dates from August 2012
• Canadian short films
• Films directed by Mike Hoolboom
• Independent films