The Impostor (hello goodbye)

On the surface, The Impostor (hello goodbye) is ostensibly a work about a dead father and a eulogy by his son. Norman Wilner finds Cockburn talks about life and death, and dreams of death, "with a childlike fascination and an adult's sense of gravity."[5]

Most of Cockburn's previous work had been, in one way or another, about himself, his own ideas: "It's me trying to figure myself out."[4] When he was asked to make a video for The Colin Campbell Sessions to be screened with other new films inspired by Colin Campbell, it gave him pause:

I didn't know how I was going to be able to do a film about myself and still be respectful. I felt guilty about using Colin's life to do stuff about myself. I felt like I was standing on the shoulders of giants. That's where the idea of the impostor came from.[4]

The Impostor is therefore "a portrait of a young man using the death of another as an opportunity to grandstand", that is to say: "It's a video about Cockburn's anxiety about making the video."[4]

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".[2] To comply with the commission, Cockburn must take inspiration from an influential predecessor or "video dad", Colin Campbell.[2] 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."[3] 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.[3]

Mike Hoolboom

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."[2] 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."[2] 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.[2][note 2]

In the mid 2000s, Cockburn was making several videos and short films any given year. In 2003, besides The Impostor, he made WEAKEND, Denominations and the first version of AUDIT.[6]

Lisa Steele, who co-founded distributor Vtape with Colin Campbell and others, commissioned the project; unusually, she approached only artists who did not know Campbell well: "She always has an eye for outreach, and it was from this missionary position that the work advanced."[3] Cockburn was unaware of this when he made The Impostor.[3]

As a commission for The Colin Campbell Sessions, the video was made with the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts Media Arts Commissioning Grant.[7]

The Impostor was shot in a single take of eighteen minutes; Cockburn then split the screen, putting the first nine minutes on the left side and the second nine on the right.[4] Hoolboom was under the impression this was done with no edits. This is not quite true, as Cockburn pointed out:

There is one not-quite-hidden but not-usually-noticed dissolve which enables me to present an 18-minute take as a nine-minute (hopefully invisible) split-screen. (I feel uncomfortable saying this, as if I were Hitchcock letting the dead mother out of the bag just because it seemed a fitting thing to do in the middle of a chat with some decent fellow down at the press club.)[3]

Cockburn said that Alex Glenfield's music is the "emotional anchor of the movie".[3] Glenfield composed and recorded it a couple of years before Cockburn's commission, and first played the CD for Cockburn while he was formulating the concept for his video. "I thought it would be appropriate for The Impostor, with its waxing/waning, loop-like structure, and when he told me the title and the sonic ingredients, I knew it was doubly perfect."[3] Glenfield had been thinking about Morse code and its use as a means for soldiers to communicate with their allies during wartime, wondering if anyone might have formulated a message for an enemy, which Cockburn called "a proposal that sounds melancholy and humane"; a part of the piece of music represents the phrase for my enemy in Morse code, repeated and superposed at various pitches.[note 3] This seemed fitting to Cockburn, referring to the "giants" on whose shoulders he "stands": "I don't know if they are my enemy – I doubt it, in fact, for they have given me so much – but quite often I feel I am theirs (or maybe rival is a more accurate, less stinging though also less evocative term than enemy)."[3]

Beginning in 2009, The Impostor began to be shown along with a selection of Cockburn's other films, under the collective title You Are In a Maze of Twisty Little Passages, All Different, the actual programme varying with the venue.[9][10]

A 55-minute DVD (for exhibitions and educational institutions) of one version of the anthology film was released in 2009.[11]

Norman Wilner describes Cockburn's work as "strange and recursive and curious and enthralling, and sometimes all at once."[5] Alissa Firth-Eagland describes Cockburn's videos as "cleverly self-referential without being didactic"; she finds his performances intriguing:

I find there are many blind spots for me in all his onscreen characterizations. A notable mutability of portrayer and portrayed is evident in particular in his work The Impostor (hello goodbye): there's a mysterious blurring of fact and fiction. I am always left wondering how much of his onscreen personalities are, in fact, him.[12]

Mike Hoolboom, in an email interview with Cockburn, finds something similar: "You deliver this monologue in a manner Colin would have relished, brimful with irony... I am fixated, as usual, on your performing presence... your movie offers the... vicarious pleasures of the meta-verse: not emotions, but emotions that are about emotions."[3]