page_title: The Impostor (hello goodbye)
section_title: Fathers and sons: the anxiety of influence
hierarchical_section_title: The Impostor (hello goodbye) / Themes / Fathers and sons: the anxiety of influence
caption_attribution_description: English: Canadian experimental filmmaker Mike Hoolboom
context_page_description: The Impostor (hello goodbye) is a 2003 Canadian short experimental film by video artist Daniel Cockburn, one of several works commissioned for The Colin Campbell Sessions and inspired by the makings of video art pioneer Colin Campbell for the Tranz Tech festival. Cockburn's video draws formally on Campbell's style while at the same time metaphorically expresses the artist's anxiety in making the video itself.
context_section_description: Cockburn transforms this anxiety of performance into one of influence, through the theme of fathers and sons, which Mike Hoolboom traces across a number of Cockburn's videos, including WEAKEND, which premiered at the same festival as The Impostor, in which video the theme is "brought to a head". To comply with the commission, Cockburn must take inspiration from an influential predecessor or "video dad", Colin Campbell. The man speaking in the video, according to Cockburn, has an "adverse relationship to his late father (who is also himself) – an antagonism born of disassociation, of one party's ignorance and the other's absence." He is attempting to breach that chasm by throwing a rope across it, "even as a third aspect of himself scissors the rope into little bits."
  Colin is an influence at second remove; I understand his work by having heard people talk about it, by having seen work made in its shadow. So my work is the shadow of a shadow, a second-generation copy at best. For me, in the context of video art, Colin is like, for instance, Orson Welles (and I mean the Welles of Chimes at Midnight and It's All True!, not the Welles who made Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil and the other few that I actually have seen)... And if we stand on the shoulders of those who come before us, then I'm standing on someone who's standing on Colin's shoulders, and I've gotten to this height to no credit of my own... And I want to build on what I'm standing on, not just fritter away my vantage point from atop the dead, yet it feels that to do so I have to wrest attention away from them, toward myself (because attention is a finite resource)... At any rate, I feel a need to justify or defend myself – even if only to myself, to make me happy.
  
  Colin Campbell made his first films in Sackville, where he made a "gently ironic send up" of his small town origins (he was born in Reston, Manitoba) and "big world aspirations," done in the form of a monologue delivered to camera, "all in one take, like so much work made in the seventies." Sackville, I'm Yours (1972) became a template for Campbell's work over the next three decades, and "set up a style sheet for much of the field." Cockburn's own performance addressed directly to the camera is a postmodernist take on the motif: "there is a picture playing beside him, which turns his speaking self into a picture as well." Hoolboom asks whether the invoked eulogy, or indeed the video itself, is a eulogy for Campbell, and interprets the invocation as an expression of "the wish for the father's death", a metaphor for "the unconscious of the medium itself, the unspoken darkness that lies at the heart of the collective project" of video art:
  Isn't this a confession? Whenever I speak I am killing him. Or: the only way for me to speak is to kill my father. Every word I pronounce is sharp, that's how dad feels it, because it's either him or me. There's no way for the two of us to talk at the same time, it's figure versus ground, Arnold versus Daniel, father against son.
caption: Mike Hoolboom
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