ATOM EGOYAN
Atom Egoyan
Cairo, Egypt, 1960
(director, producer, screenwriter, editor)
Atom Egoyan occupies a distinct position within Canadian filmmaking ? that of
auteur. His unequivocal authorial vision and inimitable style are sustained
throughout a body of work that includes 10 feature films. Egoyan is the most
consummate filmmaker of his generation, and his films appeal to national and
international audiences alike and, increasingly, receive greater critical
acclaim and commercial success.
Born in Cairo of Armenian descent and raised in Victoria, B.C., Egoyan moved to
Toronto at 18 to study international relations at the University of Toronto.
While studying, two formative encounters fused to inform his life work ? fluency
with his ethnic heritage and the cinema. Egoyan produced several short films at
the Hart House Film Board while furthering his knowledge of Armenian history and
politics. Often submerged and mediated, the residual effects of the Armenian
genocide shadow Egoyan?s work to date. The recurring themes of ritualized trauma
from dispossession to alienation to ?baggage,? in general, arose from the unsaid
of Armenia?s past, posing an indomitable challenge to representation in the
present. Egoyan?s films work at the intermediacies of memory and fiction almost
by necessity.
Archaeological in impulse, Egoyan?s approach to truth and character is
incessantly layered. His films relentlessly highlight the act of looking from
both structural and thematic perspectives, fully exploiting possible
implications from knowledge to voyeurism to comprehension and insight. At the
same time, the oft-used Canadian filmic tropes of identity and its uncertainty,
image and technology, and communication or the lack thereof compete for equal
thematic screen time. The content, aesthetics and production contexts of Egoyan?s
films are decidedly interstitial. Multi-directional, they spring from national
and diasporic contexts, between art cinema narration and the recent adoption of
popular genres, chiefly the thriller, that coalesce into an unprecedented brand
of filmmaking. Still, Egoyan remains our resident ?spokes-filmmaker? for Canada?s
brand of New World modernity.
Renowned actor Arsinee Khanjian, Egoyan?s long-time collaborator, helps to
solidify the label of international art-cinema auteur. Khanjian?s roles now
approximate a signature effect in the films; her performances span from
characters such as telephone sex trade worker, frumpy hotel cleaner, pregnant
strip club proprietor to Ontario Censor Board member, cultural translator,
cooking show celebrity and art history professor. The consistent participation
of numerous actors ? Bruce Greenwood, Sarah Polley, Elias Koteas, Gabrielle Rose,
Maury Chaykin, among others ? also provide identifiable Egoyan markers across a
range of films. The reliable makeup of Egoyan?s habitual crew further
strengthens auteurist coherency. Paul Sarossy?s cinematography, Mychael Danna?s
musical compositions, Steve Munro?s soundscapes and Phillip Barker?s designs
routinely conjoin to imbue and consolidate the look and sound of the films.
Key Egoyan sensibilities emerge in Next of Kin (1984) and continue throughout
Family Viewing (1987), Speaking Parts (1989) and The Adjuster (1991), though
these early features share a fascination with surface affectation particular to
emerging filmmakers of the period. Side-stepping the banal, seemingly
superficial exteriority serves to foil signature Egoyan thematic obsessions with
social taboos, specifically sex, technology and looking and relations locked
into the hermetic horrors of family closets. The films follow a strict
interwoven structure loosened by enigmatic abstraction and oblique ethnic
references. Surprisingly, the effect is sustained suspense and an arch brand of
humour fed by a formally procured self-conscious chilly distance. Driven by loss
of all kinds, characters are chronically detached, and shape their relations
toward one another through absurdist speech and the non sequitur, yet, uncannily,
they prompt compassion all the same.
While detachment is partially upheld through a seemingly mundane surface, these
early works all utilize video and the televisual and/or photographic
reproduction to work against its remote effects. Themes integral to the image
assist in teasing out the various narratives? reiteration of the slippery slope
between image and identity, between the video image and death, between
replication and reality, between the false and the true. Without exception,
representational technologies as practice and mediating motif continue to recur
throughout Egoyan?s career. Across a range of usage from familial and sacred, as
record and fetish, to voyeuristic enactment, bordering on pornography and
surveillance, the use of video in Egoyan?s universe stresses the role of
mediation in ordering experience.
The films of the mid-1990s offer a more profound exploration of contemporary
anxieties. Calendar (1993), a work both raw and tender, wrestles with belonging
and identity from here to Armenia and back again. The dissolution of home and
tradition and its uneasy, lived effects command its 12-part calendar structure.
Travelling to Armenia to procure 12 photographs of sacred churches for a
calendar is the pretext for Egoyan (playing the photographer protagonist) to
interrogate historical memory and illuminate its unattainable retrieval, in
spite of the precision of imaging technology. With Exotica (1994), perhaps an
apt title for all of Egoyan?s enterprise, original trauma (Armenia?s genocide)
shifts into the more familiar terrain of terrifying psychic dispossession.
Increased production values and less plot fragmentation than in earlier films
make room for more fully fleshed but equally disaffected and obsessive
characters. An exotic pet store owner, a stripper and a government tax auditor,
to name but a few beleaguered souls, collide at the strip club Exotica. Here,
these orphaned adults ceremoniously work through their individual baggage of
inheritance or soul murder ? from abandonment to straight-out child abuse.
Trepidation combines with the sublime to create the film?s sense of wonder, the
epicentre that also, not surprisingly, coalesces around the sticking point of
life in Toronto, or more sub-textually, Canada ? ?difference.?
The adaptations of The Sweet Hereafter (1997) and Felicia?s Journey (1999) (novels
by Russell Banks and William Trevor, respectively) effortlessly mesh with Egoyan?s
preoccupations, as both stories' claustrophobic worlds turn on the themes of
loss and violation. The Sweet Hereafter recounts a small B.C. town?s painful
recuperation from a tragic bus accident that claimed most of its children. The
individual grief of the parents is imparted, but it is the responses of a
persistent lawyer seeking to assign blame and a young survivor who entreats
acceptance beyond the accident to include incest which take precedence. More
linear and seamless than extant works, the film?s tone and subject matter are
nevertheless Egoyan?s.
While a menacing ambiance often girds Egoyan?s films, Felicia?s Journey?s
thriller roots amplify this tendency. Third in a series of films that revolve
around endangered young women and their eerie, ritualized encounters with father
figures, we witness a sensitive and sympathetic serial killer stalk an innocent
stray Irish girl. In spite of the film?s source, the radical changes in
production contexts and locale (his first co-production and the shift to the
industrial setting of Birmingham, England, and rural Ireland), signature Egoyan
fixations remain. Egoyan?s diasporic constants, such as home and family,
betrayal, the impossibility of return and the dangers inherent in detachment and
impaired sight that result are dramatized to different ends in Felicia?s Journey.
The protagonist?s criss-crossed trauma takes the opposing routes of
vulnerability and violence. But the stalker complements his emotional image bank
of looped home movies of his departed, fetishized mother with his own Peeping
Tom-like video productions, replacing the good object to horrific effect.
With Ararat (2002), Egoyan widens the standard intimacy of his palette to
produce the first film to wrestle with the Armenian genocide of 1915. Ambitious
in scope, the film memorializes the atrocities of the Armenian holocaust, but it
also conveys its residual effects from a multi-focal perspective across
generations traversing the diaspora. Beyond the immediate narrative, Ararat?s
complex lattice structure directly queries the representation of history itself,
exposing its inherent constructed nature through wildly opposing modes of
address. The sophisticated treatise on ?past-ness? and the official record
builds upon and expands Egoyan?s incessant experimentation with the dubious
promise of the image. While a contemporary Toronto tale pivots around two
families in crisis, a film-within-a-film dramatizes eyewitness accounts of the
siege of Van in eastern Turkey and the ensuing death march in epic scale. A
fictionalized celebrated Armenian director (played by Charles Aznavour) directs
scenes of slaughter in a rival filmic register; attempts at flat-footed accuracy
meshed with melodrama to signify Turkish atrocities.
The staged excess, however, underscores the futility of replication. Distancing
Brechtian techniques notwithstanding, the limitations of history as spectacle
exceed simple lessons on how visualizing history confines. Just when the re-enactments
of massacres allure, a counter-narrative suggesting fabrication often intervenes.
Each modern-day character in the framing narrative is associated with the film
production, also titled Ararat, serving to intertwine their individual, familial
and communal lives. Ararat opens with the great Armenian painter Arshille Gorky
struggling to perfect his celebrated The Artist and His Mother. Gorky?s fraught
life is Ararat?s touchstone (both the outer frame and the film-within-a-film),
its psychic structural and visual motor. Gorky survived the massacre but not its
legacy ? his unremitting attempts to render memory are also Egoyan?s. Ararat?s
mastery lies in dually sustaining belief in the possibility of representation
and its fallibility, in looking both ways.
The constant, perspicacious depth-probing in Egoyan?s films also extends to a
range of creative projects that span several artistic mediums to include opera,
music and the visual arts. No doubt, Egoyan?s intellectual scope and creative
dexterity inform all of his endeavours, engendering a crosshatch effect across
art forms. With the Canadian Opera Company, he successfully launched Salome, his
directorial opera debut in 1996, followed by his own Elsewhereness in 1998 and
Gavin Bryar?s Dr. Ox?s Experiment. Egoyan proved his musical acuity with the
attentive aural direction of Yo Yo Ma in Sarabande, a telefilm inspired by Bach?s
Cello Suite #4.
Egoyan?s art installations have similarly gained distinction to include works
completed for the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, the Venice Biennale and
Le Frenoy in France. His latest projects span from Evidence (2002) to Notorious
(2000) (a video installation that commemorates Alfred Hitchcock) to Diaspora (a
short film with music by Philip Glass, which is part of the program Philip on
Film) to Hors d?usage, a soundscape work based on reel-to-reel tapes of Montreal
residents. Krapp?s Last Tape (2000), a film adaptation of Samuel Beckett?s play,
attests to Egoyan?s tremendous formal latitude, one that defies the supposed
restrictions of film as a popular medium.
Such evident, unfailing commitment to innovation and the moving image,
regardless of medium, typifies Egoyan?s output, solidifying his atypical
position in Canada?s swiftly evolving film industry. Egoyan?s zealous production
signifies his exemplary role throughout this shifting landscape. As auteurist
hallmark and chief architect, Egoyan has helped to shape and define the contours
of contemporary Canadian film, triggering, and exceeding, its promise.
Atom Egoyan
Cairo, Egypt, 1960
(director, producer, screenwriter, editor)
Atom Egoyan occupies a distinct position within Canadian filmmaking ? that of
auteur. His unequivocal authorial vision and inimitable style are sustained
throughout a body of work that includes 10 feature films. Egoyan is the most
consummate filmmaker of his generation, and his films appeal to national and
international audiences alike and, increasingly, receive greater critical
acclaim and commercial success.
Born in Cairo of Armenian descent and raised in Victoria, B.C., Egoyan moved to
Toronto at 18 to study international relations at the University of Toronto.
While studying, two formative encounters fused to inform his life work ? fluency
with his ethnic heritage and the cinema. Egoyan produced several short films at
the Hart House Film Board while furthering his knowledge of Armenian history and
politics. Often submerged and mediated, the residual effects of the Armenian
genocide shadow Egoyan?s work to date. The recurring themes of ritualized trauma
from dispossession to alienation to ?baggage,? in general, arose from the unsaid
of Armenia?s past, posing an indomitable challenge to representation in the
present. Egoyan?s films work at the intermediacies of memory and fiction almost
by necessity.
Archaeological in impulse, Egoyan?s approach to truth and character is
incessantly layered. His films relentlessly highlight the act of looking from
both structural and thematic perspectives, fully exploiting possible
implications from knowledge to voyeurism to comprehension and insight. At the
same time, the oft-used Canadian filmic tropes of identity and its uncertainty,
image and technology, and communication or the lack thereof compete for equal
thematic screen time. The content, aesthetics and production contexts of Egoyan?s
films are decidedly interstitial. Multi-directional, they spring from national
and diasporic contexts, between art cinema narration and the recent adoption of
popular genres, chiefly the thriller, that coalesce into an unprecedented brand
of filmmaking. Still, Egoyan remains our resident ?spokes-filmmaker? for Canada?s
brand of New World modernity.
Renowned actor Arsinee Khanjian, Egoyan?s long-time collaborator, helps to
solidify the label of international art-cinema auteur. Khanjian?s roles now
approximate a signature effect in the films; her performances span from
characters such as telephone sex trade worker, frumpy hotel cleaner, pregnant
strip club proprietor to Ontario Censor Board member, cultural translator,
cooking show celebrity and art history professor. The consistent participation
of numerous actors ? Bruce Greenwood, Sarah Polley, Elias Koteas, Gabrielle Rose,
Maury Chaykin, among others ? also provide identifiable Egoyan markers across a
range of films. The reliable makeup of Egoyan?s habitual crew further
strengthens auteurist coherency. Paul Sarossy?s cinematography, Mychael Danna?s
musical compositions, Steve Munro?s soundscapes and Phillip Barker?s designs
routinely conjoin to imbue and consolidate the look and sound of the films.
Key Egoyan sensibilities emerge in Next of Kin (1984) and continue throughout
Family Viewing (1987), Speaking Parts (1989) and The Adjuster (1991), though
these early features share a fascination with surface affectation particular to
emerging filmmakers of the period. Side-stepping the banal, seemingly
superficial exteriority serves to foil signature Egoyan thematic obsessions with
social taboos, specifically sex, technology and looking and relations locked
into the hermetic horrors of family closets. The films follow a strict
interwoven structure loosened by enigmatic abstraction and oblique ethnic
references. Surprisingly, the effect is sustained suspense and an arch brand of
humour fed by a formally procured self-conscious chilly distance. Driven by loss
of all kinds, characters are chronically detached, and shape their relations
toward one another through absurdist speech and the non sequitur, yet, uncannily,
they prompt compassion all the same.
While detachment is partially upheld through a seemingly mundane surface, these
early works all utilize video and the televisual and/or photographic
reproduction to work against its remote effects. Themes integral to the image
assist in teasing out the various narratives? reiteration of the slippery slope
between image and identity, between the video image and death, between
replication and reality, between the false and the true. Without exception,
representational technologies as practice and mediating motif continue to recur
throughout Egoyan?s career. Across a range of usage from familial and sacred, as
record and fetish, to voyeuristic enactment, bordering on pornography and
surveillance, the use of video in Egoyan?s universe stresses the role of
mediation in ordering experience.
The films of the mid-1990s offer a more profound exploration of contemporary
anxieties. Calendar (1993), a work both raw and tender, wrestles with belonging
and identity from here to Armenia and back again. The dissolution of home and
tradition and its uneasy, lived effects command its 12-part calendar structure.
Travelling to Armenia to procure 12 photographs of sacred churches for a
calendar is the pretext for Egoyan (playing the photographer protagonist) to
interrogate historical memory and illuminate its unattainable retrieval, in
spite of the precision of imaging technology. With Exotica (1994), perhaps an
apt title for all of Egoyan?s enterprise, original trauma (Armenia?s genocide)
shifts into the more familiar terrain of terrifying psychic dispossession.
Increased production values and less plot fragmentation than in earlier films
make room for more fully fleshed but equally disaffected and obsessive
characters. An exotic pet store owner, a stripper and a government tax auditor,
to name but a few beleaguered souls, collide at the strip club Exotica. Here,
these orphaned adults ceremoniously work through their individual baggage of
inheritance or soul murder ? from abandonment to straight-out child abuse.
Trepidation combines with the sublime to create the film?s sense of wonder, the
epicentre that also, not surprisingly, coalesces around the sticking point of
life in Toronto, or more sub-textually, Canada ? ?difference.?
The adaptations of The Sweet Hereafter (1997) and Felicia?s Journey (1999) (novels
by Russell Banks and William Trevor, respectively) effortlessly mesh with Egoyan?s
preoccupations, as both stories' claustrophobic worlds turn on the themes of
loss and violation. The Sweet Hereafter recounts a small B.C. town?s painful
recuperation from a tragic bus accident that claimed most of its children. The
individual grief of the parents is imparted, but it is the responses of a
persistent lawyer seeking to assign blame and a young survivor who entreats
acceptance beyond the accident to include incest which take precedence. More
linear and seamless than extant works, the film?s tone and subject matter are
nevertheless Egoyan?s.
While a menacing ambiance often girds Egoyan?s films, Felicia?s Journey?s
thriller roots amplify this tendency. Third in a series of films that revolve
around endangered young women and their eerie, ritualized encounters with father
figures, we witness a sensitive and sympathetic serial killer stalk an innocent
stray Irish girl. In spite of the film?s source, the radical changes in
production contexts and locale (his first co-production and the shift to the
industrial setting of Birmingham, England, and rural Ireland), signature Egoyan
fixations remain. Egoyan?s diasporic constants, such as home and family,
betrayal, the impossibility of return and the dangers inherent in detachment and
impaired sight that result are dramatized to different ends in Felicia?s Journey.
The protagonist?s criss-crossed trauma takes the opposing routes of
vulnerability and violence. But the stalker complements his emotional image bank
of looped home movies of his departed, fetishized mother with his own Peeping
Tom-like video productions, replacing the good object to horrific effect.
With Ararat (2002), Egoyan widens the standard intimacy of his palette to
produce the first film to wrestle with the Armenian genocide of 1915. Ambitious
in scope, the film memorializes the atrocities of the Armenian holocaust, but it
also conveys its residual effects from a multi-focal perspective across
generations traversing the diaspora. Beyond the immediate narrative, Ararat?s
complex lattice structure directly queries the representation of history itself,
exposing its inherent constructed nature through wildly opposing modes of
address. The sophisticated treatise on ?past-ness? and the official record
builds upon and expands Egoyan?s incessant experimentation with the dubious
promise of the image. While a contemporary Toronto tale pivots around two
families in crisis, a film-within-a-film dramatizes eyewitness accounts of the
siege of Van in eastern Turkey and the ensuing death march in epic scale. A
fictionalized celebrated Armenian director (played by Charles Aznavour) directs
scenes of slaughter in a rival filmic register; attempts at flat-footed accuracy
meshed with melodrama to signify Turkish atrocities.
The staged excess, however, underscores the futility of replication. Distancing
Brechtian techniques notwithstanding, the limitations of history as spectacle
exceed simple lessons on how visualizing history confines. Just when the re-enactments
of massacres allure, a counter-narrative suggesting fabrication often intervenes.
Each modern-day character in the framing narrative is associated with the film
production, also titled Ararat, serving to intertwine their individual, familial
and communal lives. Ararat opens with the great Armenian painter Arshille Gorky
struggling to perfect his celebrated The Artist and His Mother. Gorky?s fraught
life is Ararat?s touchstone (both the outer frame and the film-within-a-film),
its psychic structural and visual motor. Gorky survived the massacre but not its
legacy ? his unremitting attempts to render memory are also Egoyan?s. Ararat?s
mastery lies in dually sustaining belief in the possibility of representation
and its fallibility, in looking both ways.
The constant, perspicacious depth-probing in Egoyan?s films also extends to a
range of creative projects that span several artistic mediums to include opera,
music and the visual arts. No doubt, Egoyan?s intellectual scope and creative
dexterity inform all of his endeavours, engendering a crosshatch effect across
art forms. With the Canadian Opera Company, he successfully launched Salome, his
directorial opera debut in 1996, followed by his own Elsewhereness in 1998 and
Gavin Bryar?s Dr. Ox?s Experiment. Egoyan proved his musical acuity with the
attentive aural direction of Yo Yo Ma in Sarabande, a telefilm inspired by Bach?s
Cello Suite #4.
Egoyan?s art installations have similarly gained distinction to include works
completed for the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, the Venice Biennale and
Le Frenoy in France. His latest projects span from Evidence (2002) to Notorious
(2000) (a video installation that commemorates Alfred Hitchcock) to Diaspora (a
short film with music by Philip Glass, which is part of the program Philip on
Film) to Hors d?usage, a soundscape work based on reel-to-reel tapes of Montreal
residents. Krapp?s Last Tape (2000), a film adaptation of Samuel Beckett?s play,
attests to Egoyan?s tremendous formal latitude, one that defies the supposed
restrictions of film as a popular medium.
Such evident, unfailing commitment to innovation and the moving image,
regardless of medium, typifies Egoyan?s output, solidifying his atypical
position in Canada?s swiftly evolving film industry. Egoyan?s zealous production
signifies his exemplary role throughout this shifting landscape. As auteurist
hallmark and chief architect, Egoyan has helped to shape and define the contours
of contemporary Canadian film, triggering, and exceeding, its promise.