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.
Plot
In a split screen, a man dressed in a black suit and tie (Daniel Cockburn) speaks directly to the audience, while a black and white home movie is being projected next to him, on the left. He describes a dream in which he was asked to read a eulogy for his father. As he does so, the projectionist on the left hand side (Daniel Cockburn) is cutting the film with scissors.
Watching his father (Daniel Cockburn) in the home movie, he realizes that the gestures his father made are a kind of prison; he is forced to repeat them involuntarily. Then the man in black looks on with the horror of recognition, realizing that his father's body language "prefigured all the gestures into which I would later grow, thinking they were my own."
In a dream, the man returns to his father's bedside. "I had gone to visit him at the hospital, and he had been unconscious, but I thought he might like to hear the sound of my voice, so I spoke to him..." The man's father is on his deathbed. Moments before his father dies, the man speaks to him, but his father makes no sign of hearing. The man pulls out an IV tube and speaks into it as though it were a microphone. His words turn into sharp needles that enter his father through the tube, who dies presently. The man wonders if his words killed his father, or perhaps removing the tube.
At his father's funeral, the man says that his inheritance now depends on the tears shed by the audience.
The man changes places with the projectionist in the left hand side of the screen. The projectionist destroys the work.
Cast
Daniel Cockburn plays both a fictional version of himself and his "fictionally dead father".
The fictional Cockburn is himself conceived as split between the "monologist" who delivers the introspective eulogy, and "the projectionist who destroys the film after its projected." At the end, Cockburn the monologist steps back to take the place of Cockburn the projectionist, and Cockburn the projectionist steps forward to take the place of Cockburn the monologist.
Themes
Life and death
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."
The artist and the anxiety of performance
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." 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. 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."