Four Films in Search of an Author: Egoyan Since Exotica

Scattered pleasures and frequent irritations

As someone who has followed Atom Egoyan’s career closely since his pre-Exotica days, viewing his most recent feature films has been an intensely ambivalent experience. While The Sweet Hereafter (1997) far exceeded the dubious expectations created by its status as an adaptation, its use of name actor Ian Holm in a starring role, and its release in the multiplexes, his subsequent films have disappointed them. Moreover, despite the scattered recognition received by Felicia’s Journey (1999), Ararat (2002), and even, here and there, Where the Truth Lies (2005), it is apparent from the relative dearth of serious scholarly scrutiny that the earlier critical enthusiasm for Egoyan’s films has been confused, if not defused altogether, by his recent turn to the popular.

The goal of this essay is not, however, to beat these films with the club of Egoyan’s earlier films, nor simply to recuperate them within the auteurist rubric of his oeuvre. Rather, I want to ascertain in a critically satisfying manner exactly what distinguishes them from the prior oeuvre. Not only do I hope thereby to understand better both the films and the filmmaker, but also to find a critical vocabulary able to reckon with the fact that Egoyan’s turn is by no means unique in the small world of Canadian cinema, or the larger but still small world of what used to be called “art-house” filmmaking.

I begin with an analysis of The Sweet Hereafter, Felicia’s Journey (right), Ararat, and Where the Truth Lies in terms of the auteurist criteria that have — and with good reason — dominated the discussion of Egoyan’s oeuvre. Through this analysis, I demonstrate exactly where and how, in terms of form, style, and means of production, these films diverge from the accepted model of “Egoyan” as auteur. Rather than passing judgment on the validity of auteurist approaches as such, I examine the ways in which these films have resulted from and put pressure on Egoyan’s own conception and practice of auteurship. I then consider this quartet of films in conjunction with the enormous volume of Egoyan’s other cultural production during the same ten-year period, which includes but is not limited to non-commercial filmmaking, operas, gallery installations, book editing and prefacing, and journalism. In this conclusion, I suggest some of the ways in which Egoyan’s cosmopolitan turn can help to diagnose the current state of Canadian cinema as a whole in a newly globalized world of cultural production.

[Egoyan] has a list of things that attract him to a project: “Complexity. Conflicting agendas. Different people trying to present a version of reality. A hidden history. How people cope with trauma. The need to create and construct personas.
— Interview in Backstage at the time of the release of
Where the Truth Lies

There is no question that Atom Egoyan regards himself as an auteur in the classic sense of the term, the sense that dominated the burgeoning field of cinema studies during the late 1970s and early ’80s when he was attending the University of Toronto. Nor is there any question that auteurist approaches have dominated critical writing on his films, be it the journalistic reviews that checkmark his familiar obsessions, the critical assessments that outline the consistency of his themes from film to film, or the post-structuralist studies that employ his consistent thematization of media technology toward a critique of contemporary culture, representation, and gender.1 Reviewers and critics, as well as Egoyan in pronouncements such as the one cited above, tend to regard his oeuvre as an auteurist continuum, susceptible to value judgments according to the criteria of that continuum; theorists tend to truncate their analyses with 1989’s Speaking Parts (in the case of media) or with Exotica (1993) and The Sweet Hereafter, in the case of gender, tacitly asserting the lack of interest of the more recent films.

Beyond the fact (which I deal with in the conclusion of this essay) that Egoyan’s ten commercially released feature films comprise only a part of his cinematic, not to mention his artistic and cultural production, these auteurist approaches are unable to account for the dramatic shift in Egoyan’s later films in anything other than qualitative terms. In order to distinguish what has changed and what has not in the post-Exoticaperiod, I divide my analysis into three categories, all of which have been identified with auteurist production, especially in the context of the French cinema and criticism within which the term originated: formal qualities, or those related to narrative form, theme, and characterization; stylistic qualities, or those related to the visual and aural aspects of the films; and qualities of production, or those external to the film itself, such as production and distribution, and the cast and crew.2 To be sure, these are heuristic categories as much as anything, and there is much overlap between them. Nor in the space of this essay am I able to deal comprehensively with every aspect of Egoyan’s auteurship. In addition to compensating for the preponderance of formal qualities in the critical analysis of Egoyan’s films, this tri-partite division also brings sharply into focus the ways in which the later films diverge from the earlier ones.

Formal Qualities

The two primary formal characteristics of Egoyan’s oeuvre are the Freudian narrative dynamic he has labeled “the family romance” and the thematic use of media technology in relation to memory and trauma.3 We may add the nonlinear presentation of these themes as a collection of fragmented stories that coalesce only in the final reel of the film. It is significant that the media theme dominated early discussion of Egoyan’s films, while the “family romance” began to emerge as a critical rubric in the wake of Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter in part to signal a shift in focus away from the problematization of technology within the diegesis of the films. Indeed, it was during the promotion of Felicia’s Journey that Egoyan first began discussing publicly a traumatic episode in his own youth — being the passive onlooker of the incestuous abuse of a young woman with whom he was (or wished to be) romantically entangled.4 This confessionary revelation retrospectively injected a strong autobiographical component into the family romance dynamic that punctuated his films from the relationship between the masquerading “lost son” and his adoptive sister in Next of Kin (1984) through to the overtly incestuous relationships at the core of the traumas in Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, and looked forward to the key relationship between step-siblings in Ararat (above).

In the films through to Exotica, this narrative dynamic was explicitly mediated, as well as implicitly subordinated, to the theme of mediation through technology: Peter records the progress of his infiltration of the adopted Armenian family on tape recorder in Next of Kin; Van’s father tapes his couplings with a mistress over videos of Van’s absent mother in Family Viewing; Clara remembers her beloved brother in a video mausoleum in Speaking Parts. The celebrated critique of media culture and the substitution of taped for authentic memory is no less foregrounded: the video therapy sessions of the Armenian family and the handheld camera documenting Peter’s surprise party in Next of Kin; the battle over the memory of Van’s mother conducted through videotape in Family Viewing (1987); the climactic daytime talk show dramatization of Clara’s trauma in Speaking Parts (1989); the censor’s clandestine taping of the pornography she reviews in The Adjuster (1991); the photographer’s obsessive reviewing of the video record of his trip to Armenia in Calendar (1993), reliving the loss of his wife while seeking memories of the reasons for it. I have discussed this theme at length elsewhere, in particular the one-sided reception of it as a satirical critique of the mediation of memory rather than as a dialectical analysis of its role in contemporary culture.5

Within the feature films, the thematic presence of media technology recedes to the background from The Adjuster and Exotica onward, accompanied by what most critics — Egoyan included — have identified as an increased range and depth of emotion and compassion for the characters.6 To be sure, Egoyan also maintains that his earlier films had attempted to take the same attitude toward their characters, but that he had not managed successfully to impart that attitude to his audience.7 This seems like special pleading; whatever the reason for it, there is no question that a shift occurred in the portrayal of character, nor that that shift coincided with a marked widening of budget, audience, and reputation. While Egoyan has remained remarkably consistent in his themes throughout the shift in his means of presenting them, it is important to note the increased self-consciousness with which those themes are presented in the post-Exotica films, a self-consciousness in which the above claim to continuity participates.

With The Sweet Hereafter, for the first time, Egoyan began to “cite” his own auteurist themes, explicitly deploying them rather than implicitly reproducing them. This is consonant with the increased openness with which he discussed their origins in interviews and articles. I do not mean by this that Egoyan’s earlier films were at all “unselfconscious” — they are, in fact, noticeably self-conscious in their intellectual underpinnings — but that it is their meaning that is self-conscious rather than their status as emblems of his identity as auteur.

The ways in which the incest and the media themes are cited changes steadily from Exotica onward, but the inversion of thematic prominence is consistent. Whereas in the early films the incest theme provided the subtextual means by which to enunciate the critique of media, in the later films media technology was subordinated to the task of enunciating the theme of incest, or, more generally, the conflicted relation between fathers and daughters. Video makes a single albeit significant appearance in Exotica, providing the audience with a poignant video glimpse of the daughter and wife doubly lost by Francis through the actual act of abuse and murder and the subsequent false accusations of guilt. While doubtless partaking of the same analysis of mediated memory and trauma as the video sequences in the earlier films, the central scenario with Francis’s former babysitter (and child abuse survivor) Christina in the Exotica club presents the performative ritual in the more traditionally mediated form of a face-to-face encounter, just as Mitchell Stephens’ memories of his daughter as an innocent baby are presented to us as a series of first-person anecdotes recounted by Stephens to a childhood friend of Zoe’s during the course of a long airplane journey. Neither of these, consequently, is visually mediated through any framework of video.

The invasive quality of Stephens’ lawsuit in The Sweet Hereafter, however, is demonstrated sharply through his relationship to technology. The key confrontation with Billy Ansel occurs while Stephens is videotaping the wrecked school bus. It is interrupted by a cell phone call from Stephens’s estranged daughter, which Stephens immediately (and unsuccessfully) appropriates as an anguished remark about how “we have all lost our daughters,” an ironized rehearsal of the one-sided critique of postmodernity so common to earlier Egoyan criticism that feels singularly crass in the face of an irredeemably real loss of children that had nothing whatsoever to do with the ills of contemporary society. The single manifestation of Stephens’ promise of wealth is the computer he donates to the new bedroom of his star witness, the wheelchair-bound Nicole. In a supremely self-consciously ironic remark, the counterpoint of Stephens’s above, Nicole’s only comment on the devastating effects of her perjured deposition is the faux-innocent question to her abusive father as he sinks dejected into the driver’s seat of the family station wagon, “Do you think he’ll let us keep the computer?”

In The Sweet Hereafter, Egoyan reduced the novel’s explicit discussion of Sam’s sexual abuse of his daughter Nicole to a single, romantically rendered seduction scene. In his adaptation of William Trevor’s novel Felicia’s Journey, Egoyan altogether eliminated the incestuous relationship between Joseph Hilditch and his overbearing mother revealed near the end, dismissively remarking that it would have made the son’s character “thunderingly reductive.”8 Instead, he focused the theme of incest on the relationship between the predatory father-figure Hilditch and the teenaged women to whom he offers assistance and protection. Moreover, rather than Trevor’s internal monologue to signal gradually to the reader the sinister results of Hilditch’s offer, Egoyan introduced surveillance video, catalogued by Hilditch in an archive hidden in his otherwise Luddite mansion along with the cooking-show videos of his vanished mother, all that remain of Trevor’s scenes of cynical seduction.

In Egoyan’s most recent films, Ararat and Where the Truth Lies (right), the incest theme is subordinated to other concerns. The pseudo-incestuous relationship between Raffi and his step-sister Celia in Ararat is presented as a fact in the present; video and mediation are reserved for the more fraught issues of representing the Armenian holocaust and untangling their mother Ani’s relationship to the siblings’ respective fathers. The predatory father-figure is thus absent from the family romance, replaced by the mystery of his death(s); the theme is displaced to the psycho-social level of the film-within-a-film’s character of Jevdet Bay, the evil Turk. In Where the Truth Lies, Egoyan introduced a subtext of the theme of father-daughter abuse to Rupert Holmes’s hard-boiled female reporter by casting youthful and fragile-looking actress Alison Lohman instead (to much critical derision), and adding a central backstory in which the young Karen O’Connor, played by the same actress, appeared on TV in the comedy duo’s fundraising telethon.9 The addition of a videotaped memory equally added a muted theme of incest, even as the introduction of the theme, as many critics noted, mitigated against the film’s effectiveness as a thriller.

Egoyan himself has noted that the shift from original to adapted screenplays allowed him to escape from the thematic impasse to which his own obsessions had led him.10 At the same time, the changes he made to the works he adapted reveal quite clearly the different ways in which he had come to understand those themes. While often dramatically effective, especially in The Sweet Hereafter, the fact that the themes were intentionally worked into rather than originated with the source text also emphasizes the sense of citation.

In addition to the changes rung on the incest theme, planting it as the secret foundation of the narrative rather than an overt plot point, Egoyan reworked his source materials in other significant ways. He expands the single pair of phone calls to Stephens’s motel room that climaxes the central monologue in Banks’ novel with the revelation that Zoe has tested HIV-positive into a tragicomic repetition in which she constantly harasses Stephens through his cell phone at inopportune moments. The cell phone motif simultaneously reminds us of the similarity of Stephens’ own tragedy to the townspeople’s loss and its distance from that same loss, rooting that comparison in a critique of modernity equally signified by Zoe’s presence in a phone booth in the midst of an urban wasteland at the other end of the line. Egoyan also added the aforementioned video camera and computer. Where Banks broadly contrasted the cynical, self-aware lawyer to the psyches of the small-town inhabitants struggling to make sense of their tragedy, Egoyan rooted that contrast in issues of technology and mediation. The immediacy of our emotional relationship with the townspeople’s loss is mirrored by their physical relationship to each other and the world around them. The tactile nature of their small-town occupations — Billy Ansel is a mechanic, Sam Burnell a plumber, the Ottos make crafts, Dolores Driscoll drives a bus — contrasts sharply with Stephens’s abstract relation to loss. At the same time, the sharply delineated introduction of what previously had been a universal critique of media technology serves to complicate the dichotomy. The tactile relationship to their surroundings encompasses Sam’s abuse of his daughter as well as Billy’s ability to reject the lawyer’s temptation; Stephens’s alienated relationship to the tragedy empowers Nicole to free herself from her father’s grip.

Consistent with the emotional immediacy of the later movies, Egoyan introduced a thematic register wholly absent from his earlier auteurist repertoire: the fairy tale. Used in different ways in every film from Exotica to Where the Truth Lies, the fairy-tale motif provides an internal hermeneutic that for the first time provides a broad social context independent of the media-technology thematic. To be sure, only in retrospect could one identify the schoolgirl scenario ritualistically reenacted in Exoticain terms of a fairy-tale motif, but already Egoyan had dissociated the scenario from a presentation through the means of technology. As a pre-modern form derived from oral culture, the power of the fairy tale lies in its archetypal depiction of interpersonal relations, a version of the family romance accessible, if you will, even to the child. In this sense, the late-coming revelation that the incestuous striptease ritual is as necessary to Christina as it is to Francis is essential to understanding the shift in focus of the film from Egoyan’s earlier oeuvre.

Egoyan’s introduction of Robert Browning’s poetic version of the Pied Piper legend to The Sweet Hereafter is the most prominent use of the fairy-tale motif, and its hermeneutic role within the film has been amply covered in the criticism.11 What interests me here about the motif is the way it encourages the viewer to engage with the film from the child’s point of view. Egoyan defended himself from criticism of the perceived romanticism of the single incest scene he included by stating that he had shot it from the point of view of Nicole’s perceptions.12 The Pied Piper motif similarly retells the meaning of the bus crash from a child’s perspective, emphasizing the point by concluding the film with a pre-crash scene of Nicole reading the poem to Billy Ansel’s twins overlain with her final voiceover, appropriated from the novel’s Dolores, relating the fairy-tale theme to Banks’s title metaphor of “the sweet hereafter.”13

Only a minority of reviewers caught the added references in Felicia’s Journey to Bluebeard, another fairy tale of predatory males, just as only a few saw fit to comment on the scenes of the biblical legend of Salomé glimpsed by Hilditch as a Rita Hayworth vehicle on a hospital TV screen that prompts a flashback to the boy at the opera with his mother which motivates the use of opera glasses during his dining rituals.14 To a man who had recently mounted Strauss’s Salomé for Toronto’s Canadian Opera Company (1996), and who was no doubt familiar with Bartók’sBluebeard’s Castle (directed by Robert Lepage for the COC in 1992), not to mention Jane Campion’s use of the myth in a similar context in her 1993 film The Piano, these were essential subtexts to the film’s meaning, as his repeated mention of them in the DVD commentary makes abundantly clear. In the DVD commentary on Elaine Cassidy’s hooded blue duffle coat, especially in the key abortion sequence where she dreams of her lost baby playing with its father in the same color blue, Egoyan also introduces the more familiar figure of Little Red Riding Hood.15 Given the currency of that myth in popular culture as an image of child abuse and seduction, however, it is not surprising that Egoyan displaced it by altering the color of the cloak and subordinating it to the less familiar forms available through Bluebeard and Salomé.

The Bluebeard motif neatly introduces the concept of seriality to the child’s perception of the predatory male, while the locked closet equally neatly tropes the issues of denial and secrecy that Egoyan has repeatedly cited as central to his understanding of traumatic memory.16 The Salomé motif, conversely, signals Egoyan’s amplification of Felicia’s power within the narrative. Although it is the maternity signified by her pregnancy rather than the dancer’s mature sexuality that ensures the death of the male protagonist, the image testifies in either case to the power of female corporality to trouble male authority. Moreover, Egoyan links that power to his own refusal to depict the serial killer’s violence toward his female victims onscreen. As he spells out in the DVD commentary, he found it ironically satisfying that the only physically violent moment in the film comes on a TV screen, in a Technicolor Hollywood film from the 1950s world of Hilditch’s childhood, and at the hands of a woman.17 Here, too, Egoyan cites the auteurist thematic of his early films to make a secondary point rather than a thorough-going critique. Eschewing Trevor’s conventionally Oedipal etiology, Egoyan grounds the mother’s traumatic effect on Hilditch in a sterile relationship to the budding television culture of the ’50s, allying Salomé to the TV-star mother, accessible only through the television screen. She may remain a castrating monster, but that effect will be blamed on the culture rather than the individual.18

The budding celebrity culture of the late ’50s that produced Gala is also indicted for empowering the hedonistic and predatory lifestyle of Vince and Lanny, the famously successful comedy duo in Where the Truth Lies. The novel’s Alice-in-Wonderland motif is maintained in the film, where a pageant in the Wonderland children’s clinic concludes in a threesome in which a costumed Alice fellates Karen. Especially as realized by Egoyan, the motif serves to introduce, if in a heavily displaced form, a familiarly pedophilic theme to the “wonderland” of celebrity.19 Once seduced by the media trappings of that other world in her childhood, the young reporter, now herself a halfway member of it, offers her body as price of entry into its ugly secrets.

Ararat has a wildly different agenda, but its formal structure reworks its historical material in quite a similar way to Egoyan’s reworking of the novels at the basis of his three other most recent films. Although the first version of the screenplay focused exclusively on historical events, Egoyan eventually came to realize that, for both aesthetic and practical reasons, he could only depict the events as a film within a film.20 By framing a tragedy of epic dimensions with the resolutely childish perceptions and traumas of three young persons — Raffi’s and Celia’s respective searches for the meaning of their fathers’ deaths and Gorky’s for that of his mother — and the emotionally raw and socially immature results of those searches — drug smuggling, vandalism, and suicide, respectively — Egoyan situated the meaning of his film within a child’s perspective.21 The perspective of the young Gorky in Van is seized on by the film-within-a-film’s makers as an emotional conduit to the historical melodrama they envision, while Egoyan’s more intellectual approach to that same figure structures his own narrative. That Ani’s reading of Gorky’s painting, Mother and Son, is drawn from Egoyan’s highly personal portrait of his son and exegesis of the painting, A Portrait of Arshile (included on the bonus disk of the Ararat DVD) only heightens the sense of the child’s perspective, just as the fact that he “had always wanted to make a film about the Armenian Genocide of 1915” frames his own engagement with the film in terms of a youthful perspective.22

Here, too, the motif of media and mediation delineates forms of engagement with the past. Celia’s relationship to artistic media is simultaneously direct, adversarial, and misplaced: not only does she physically attack Gorky’s portrait because of what it represents to Ani, but she is the only character whose décor includes a computer itself, pasted with clipped artworks.23 His sole conduit to the past before the tragedy a photograph of himself as a boy with his mother, Gorky’s relationship to media technology is glossed with the nostalgia we now associate with the still photograph. Similarly, Gorky chooses to understand that relationship through what is to us the even more anachronistic mode of the oil painting. The most powerful image available of the Armenian holocaust, and in many ways the only cultural product available of it to the Western world before Egoyan’s film, Gorky’s painting nevertheless seems truly accessible only to the informed gaze of a highly trained intellectual such as Ani. While Raffi’s video diary of Mount Ararat is possessed of a profound meaning the young photographer was unable to receive from his mother’s cold analysis of Gorky’s canvas, it is also compromised by the Satanic bargain he has had to make in order to get the shots he wanted. The cans of celluloid filled either with illicit drugs or with invaluable images are a transparently urgent metaphor for the bargain Egoyan must have felt necessary to make in order to do the film: a bargain with dollars, with Hollywood genres, with everything his early films had negated. At the same time, as Calendar had made abundantly clear, there was no historical meaning or identity to be found from within the terms of that negation. By recovering the absolute conviction of a child’s perspective on his profession and his obsessions, Egoyan argued that he could work his way out of the intellectual and emotional impasse of his early films’ inability to confront the denial of his own history and identity.

Stylistic Qualities

While formal qualities garner the lion’s share of analysis of Egoyan (and other filmmakers) as auteurs, the stylistic means of realizing those themes is equally essential to their meaning and equally revealing of the changes in that meaning over his career. A key but unnoticed shift in style from Exotica onward is Egoyan’s emergence as a studio director, and, in his most recent films, as a consummate creator of period pieces. The importance of this shift in approach emerges in Egoyan’s discussion of the making of Felicia’s Journey, where he found himself with the entire repertoire of London’s fabled Shepperton Studios at his disposal:

It was a great privilege for me to create a set. I had never been able to afford one before. The nature of the films I had done before meant that I had to build rooms in warehouses and wait for trains to stop. You just don’t have the control that you do when you’re using a huge studio like Shepperton and I took full advantage of that. For instance, when you make a set like that and want to populate it in England, there are prop houses where they’ve kept everything from every film that’s ever been made.… In Canada, we don’t have that depth. I needed a mixer from the 1950s and had five choices of models that had been stored; that seemed really remarkable.24

In his immersion within the new concerns of Felicia’s Journey, Egoyan neglects to mention several key facts. First of all, this was the first period film he had done; there had no been no need for such “remarkable” props as 1950s mixers in any of his previous films. What he stressed in discussions of those earlier films was his ability to discover the settings he needed within the landscape itself. An important aspect of the critique of postmodernity of his early films was the fact that the issues they discussed actually existed and could be represented as real: the video mausoleum existed in Japan; the emblematic house of The Adjuster was a model home discovered on the edge of a nonexistent housing development just in time to be incorporated into the film. The essence of the kind of independent, no-budget films he had been used to shooting was the paradoxical freedom to be gained from making do with what he had.

It is not coincidental that the first film in which Egoyan had a sizeable budget, Exotica($2 million), was also the first film in which, rather than a setting whose reality was demonstrably real, the construction of a plausibly real but imaginary setting — the nightclub — was central to the film’s meaning. The tension in Exotica emerges from the fact that its nightclub makes us accept it as real even as we know that its non-exploitative appropriation of an exploitative institution — the strip club — cannot actually exist.25 The emotional accessibility of the films from Exotica on is inseparable from this fundamental shift in the epistemological status of their settings. Whether using locations or constructed sets, the later films require a suspension of disbelief and emotional identification diametrically opposed to the acceptance of their account of culture and emotional distance required of the prior films.

What is fascinating about Egoyan’s oeuvre is not so much its consistency as the fact that he has managed to elicit a similar set of critical responses to such a radical shift in emphasis. Now, we could just as well explain this shift in terms of economics as in terms of artistic vision. The increase in budget made newly available to Egoyan techniques and strategies previously unavailable to him, while formally his means of production has changed much less — after all, he has retained the screenwriter credit for every one of his films. Certainly, Egoyan has put those extra dollars on the screen: the carefully created atmosphere of the establishing shots of the Exotica club; the brilliantly chilling helicopter shot of the bus sliding off the road and sinking through the ice in The Sweet Hereafter; the languorous opening stroll through Hilditch’s house as if in the eyes of a child, matched with Hitchcockian precision by the man’s final stroll to his death in the kitchen in Felicia’s Journey; but also the powerfully evocative portrait of Felicia and Hilditch against the massive backdrop of the Birmingham locations, on a scale and with a visual sharpness unseen before Exotica; the patently artificial epic settings of Saroyan’s Ararat, simultaneously evidence of Egoyan’s inability to make a historical epic and manifesto of his refusal to do so (not to mention the novel use of CGI effects in the battle scenes); the big-budget recreations of the ’50s and the ’70s in Where the Truth Lies — and the dismissal of their accuracy by one influential reviewer must have galled Egoyan more than any other of the many facets of the film that were dismissed.26

The visual representation of the past and of memory has similarly changed in the later films. While no “past” as such exists outside of video and tape in the early films, and nothing of aesthetic beauty emerges either — think of the taped memories of Van’s mother in Family Viewing, of Clara’s brother in Speaking Parts, or of the photographer’s images of Armenia in Calendar, their grainy texture the proud badge of their refusal to seduce us — every film from Exotica onwards presents pristine scenes of aching beauty, always set in the past, but always immediately accessible to at least one of the film’s characters along with the members of the audience.27 Now, in every case these images represent a memory of something irretrievably lost, but the change in the visual representation of that loss mirrors the change in the status of the loss. Rather than the postmodern worlds of infinitely receding representations as which Egoyan’s early films were received, we find a modernist world in which lost innocence remains, at least to all appearances, pure and immediate to memory: the fields through which Christina and Eric make their way searching, it turns out, for the body of Francis’s daughter; the overhead shot of Mitchell, his wife and their baby daughter lying in bed that is intercut with the scene of the bus crash; the overwhelmingly green fields of Felicia’s County Cork.

The Sweet Hereafter (right) amplifies this relationship into the central problematic of the film, for the entirety of the winter landscape is filmed in terms of its wintry beauty until the climactic scene of the deposition. In the scenes set before the accident, the natural beauty reminds us of what is soon to be lost; in the scene of the accident and those following it, that same beauty persists to haunt us. The motivation for this newly found auteurist visual style is clear from the formal analysis above: as does the fairy-tale motif, it provides a different reading of the perspective of childhood on the critique of memory, trauma, and postmodern culture. And although he responded with noticeable uneasiness and uncharacteristic uncertainty when the issue was raised to him in interviews, it seems difficult to believe that the shift was unrelated to the birth of Egoyan’s own son in 1993 — after all, one can trace the shift from the central scene in Exotica that revolves around Christina, club owner Zoe (she inherited it from her parents), and actor Arsinée Khanjian’s naked and very pregnant belly.

Ararat plays on this visual motif in a different way befitting the film’s uneasy relationship between the early and recent attitudes toward the past. In a key choice made at the editing table, Egoyan excised a scene in which he had explicitly located Gorky’s studio on the set of Saroyan’s Ararat. While Egoyan recounts that he cut the scene because the self-consciousness of a conversation between Ani and “Gorky” would have overly alienated audiences, the omission has another effect as well: it postpones resolving the ambiguity of the Gorky sequence until the premiere of Saroyan’s Ararat near the end of the film, when we see Simon Abkarian, the actor who plays Gorky, attending, and conclude that his scenes, also, were a part of the film.28 This ambiguity is key to the meaning of the film, since it postpones a decisive knowledge as to whether we are to interpret the scenes set in New York during the 1930s as identified with Saroyan’s film or Egoyan’s. If the former, we must interpret them according to their role within the historical melodrama; if the latter, we must interpret them according to the ostensible “realism” attributed to the modern-day scenes, and, in particular, according to Ani’s exegesis of the painting and her explanation of Gorky’s erasing of the hands.

Given the ambiguity between portraying the Armenian events as melodramatic spectacle and emphasizing their accuracy according to the historical record, the status of the Gorky story that frames the movie in its final cut bears all the more the weight of the film’s meaning. And given that the final shot is an image of young Gorky with his mother in a peaceful Van, an idyllic scene punctured by our knowledge of what is to come, but ambiguous in its status vis-à-vis the two films of Ararat, Egoyan’s attitude toward this image seems all the more problematic. And what do we make of the trademark exterior shot of beautiful rolling hills (identified in the shooting script only as “EXT. VAN. TURKEY. COUNTRY. RIVERBANK – DAY”29 ), used here as the backdrop for the long march, a rape scene witnessed by a terrified young girl, and the context for Gorky’s mother’s death by starvation? Like so much else in Ararat, the semantic confusion of Egoyan’s auteurist tropes promises a hermeneutic solution while simultaneously sabotaging that solution. Or, phrased in terms of the analysis above, he radically destabilizes the newly grounded permanence of memory at the same time that he appeals to the innate power of its historicity. While, formally, Egoyan introduces a series of motifs to resolve the inability of this contradiction to withstand the scrutiny of his own oeuvre — in particular the film cans as a metaphor for history that is irredeemably compromised on the one hand but redeemed through individual faith and conviction on the other — stylistically, the visual motifs sabotage the thematic motifs. We may know intellectually that the scenes of naked women doused with kerosene and of mothers being raped have been “staged” for Saroyan’s film, and that they are both more — because visualized — and less horrible than what actually happened, but their iconic power as conventional images so far outweighs the elaborate apparatus around them as to call into question that anything besides a melodrama vastly superior to Saroyan’s own could ever represent the truth of what happened and also to preclude the appropriateness of any other form of representation of that truth. What had set Egoyan’s previous movies apart from the exploitative potential inherent in their charged material of pedophilia, incest, and serial murder was his ability to invest only a certain set of images with the full power of that material. It is those very images — the fields of lost innocence — that Ararat profaned with Hollywood atrocities in a decision that was no less misguided for being both well intentioned and brilliantly rationalized.

In Ararat (right), the video that had framed issues of memory instead was used realistically to simulate the artifice of their truth in Saroyan’s film. Unlike the decision to shoot the bus through Stephens’ viewfinder in The Sweet Hereafter, however, this citation of Egoyan’s earlier fascination with media technology within the new context of cinematic realism is accessible only to the viewer of the DVD accompanied by Egoyan’s commentary — otherwise, it is displaced onto Raffi’s customs dilemma. The interplay is more straightforward in The Sweet Hereafter, where it not only vividly reproduces the subjective monologue form of the novel but adapts that subjectivity to a broader contrast of country versus city that is equally made through the exaggerated urban grime of Zoe’s phone booth. Moreover, the stylistic affinity of Stephens’s shots to the look of Egoyan’s early films raises a tantalizing possibility for accounting for their equally strong affinity to caricature. Just as Stephens’ pronouncement that “we have all lost our children … narcotized in front of the TV” (borrowed from the novel) reads less as a broad cultural critique than a symptom of his own alienation, so does Zoe’s depiction seem to emerge from his stereotyped vision of the city in which he also lives.30

The introduction of video to Trevor’s material does a fine job to unbalance the periodizing assumptions we would otherwise make about the time warp feel of Hilditch’s house. In what must be an homage to the reel-to-reel-tape-wielding, bitter old man in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, which Egoyan would film for English television the year after Felicia’s Journey, Hilditch is addicted to the recordings of what had once been a novel form of media but which to us — and to the technicians who digitally altered the film footage to give the effect — appears as quaintly outmoded as the faulty mixers Gala had endorsed at the height of her fame. Unlike Beckett’s Krapp, however, Hilditch is equally, if more secretly, at home in the contemporary world of technology, and the shot of Felicia’s legs from the sinister point of view of the video camera hidden in his car, like the grainy, unbalanced video footage of his prior victims, allows Egoyan subtly to insinuate the way in which being trapped in a private cul-de-sac in the past by no means exists mutually exclusively to making use of the trappings of the contemporary world for your own purposes. There is a dialectic between old and new technology far more complex and ambivalent than the simple replacement of one with the other. In this way, Egoyan’s substitution of video interviews for Trevor’s device of Hilditch’s “Memory Lane,” a mode of remembrance as anachronistic as the rest of him, successfully complicates the portrait as much as does the elimination of most of the backstory.

In Where the Truth Lies, by contrast, the periodic framing of the telethon sequences through the grainy black-and-white of 1950s video technology seems, like the touches of pedophilia, a gesture at Egoyan’s auteurist past without any intrinsic relationship to the meaning of the movie or deepening of the novel’s slick murder mystery. Rather than related to the privileged moment of the “Miracle Girl’s” meeting with Lanny or in anyway disturbing our expectations and assumptions, the revelation of the truth about Maureen’s death the night before that meeting feels like the excuse for the sensational material that has preceded it. This is a fine situation for a typical genre movie, but without any of the cross-fertilization that makes Felicia’s Journey and Ararat intellectually (if not dramatically) compelling.

Production Qualities

In his post-Exotica films, Egoyan, too, has managed to play both sides of the fence, maintaining his auteur identity by making films that purport to subvert the generic conventions on which their increased funding increasingly relies. Even the $30 million Where the Truth Lies was funded in part by Telefilm Canada.31 Whereas the microscopic budgets of Egoyan’s early films could be covered entirely by public funds on the local, provincial, and federal levels, the public-private split from Exoticaonward, and especially the increased pressure of international co-production — the mode from The Sweet Hereafter onward — altered the fundamental dynamic of the auteurist vision. Egoyan’s consistency as his own scriptwriter ensured formal consistency even as his formal priorities were shifting and evolving; the continuity of producers and crew ensured stylistic consistency — composer Mychael Danna (since Family Viewing), sound designer Steven Munro (since Family Viewing), DoP Paul Sarossy (since Speaking Parts), editor Susan Shipman (since The Adjuster), production manager and producer Sandra Cunningham (since The Adjuster), executive producer Robert Lantos (since Calendar), and two latecomers who have ensured the visual consistency of the recent films, costume designer Beth Pasternak and production designer Phillip Barker (both since The Sweet Hereafter) — even as stylistic priorities were shifting.

The use of actors has ensured another sort of consistency, but a consistency that has more and more receded to the margins of the films. Just as the formal and stylistic motifs of the early films reappear bracketed and contextualized in the later ones, so does the extra-diegetic meaning of the actors become part of the films’ diegesis rather than their reason for being. We glimpse this relationship in a playfully ironic manner in Calendar, which began life as a prize the sole requirement of which was filming in Armenia, and which so successfully played on Egoyan’s image as an auteur and Arsinée Khanjian’s image as his fetish actor/muse/wife that the small world that saw the film was convinced it was the factual document of a fractured marriage. We glimpse it the following year in the scene of Khanjian pregnant in Exotica discussed above. But only with The Sweet Hereafter do auteurist qualities of production begin to be encoded into the texture of the film in a thoroughgoing way.

This encoding is most evident in the casting. Every single actor playing the inhabitants of Sam Dent (with the notable exception of Tom McManus, who plays Sam Burnell) had appeared in at least one prior Egoyan film, most had appeared in many of them, and one — Khanjian, of course — had and continues to have appeared in every one of them. This continuity results not simply in the intuitive grasp of the director’s vision but in an allegory of the relation of each new film to that vision. While no doubt partially motivated by economic constraints, Egoyan brilliantly manipulated the casting of well-known English character actor Ian Holm in the film’s leading role in order to emphasize his status as outsider to the Canadian regulars. Egoyan aficionados thus found two forms of familiarity in conflict with one another: the expectations of deadened affect and underplaying associated with the actors of the earlier films and the expectations of quality realism associated with Ian Holm. Rather than standing on its own as postmodern alienation, the townspeople’s stunted affect is motivated within the film’s diegesis, as we come to discover, by the accident itself. The same terms equally motivate Holm’s different style in terms of his coming from another world.

The allegory becomes even more intriguing if we notice that the most jarring bit of acting comes from the other outsider, Mitchell’s daughter Zoe, who is played by avowed film fanatic Russell Banks’s daughter, Caerthan. Given Egoyan’s decision to relocate the novel’s setting from upstate New York to the Okinagan Valley in Alberta, the film’s central conflict of country versus city equally stages a subtextual conflict between local Canadian production values and those of Hollywood that eventually garnered the film a pair of Academy Award nominations. And while it is a testimony to the film’s power that this allegory remains subtextual, it certainly adds a punch to the ambiguous character of Stephens, and makes all the more pointed the call of the Pied Piper, especially as it was Sarah Polley (above) whose career most benefited from the film’s high profile.

Evidently, Egoyan made a concerted effort to duplicate this interplay in pre-production for Felicia’s Journey, proposing to William Trevor a shift of setting to the English colonialist time warp of Victoria, British Columbia, and of Felicia to a young Québécoise from somewhere in the back country.32 Trevor predictably balked at the loss of the inimitable texture of the Easter rebellion, but Egoyan’s solution was actually quite plausible given Quebec’s Catholic culture, historical backwardness, and history of conflict with its English-based colonial master. And one can readily imagine a richly Canadian allegory of Anglophone Egoyan regulars cast against established Québécois stars in place of the Irish characters, with young Marie-Josée Croze caught in the middle, the only question being on which side to place Arsinée Khanjian. Instead, Egoyan ingeniously inserted his own auteurist past in the video memories of French chef Gala and plunged into the unfamiliar. While amusing for Egoyan, Khanjian, and many long-time fans, the subplot remains wholly extrinsic to the rest of the film, like Gala herself an exotic import to the drab world of Birmingham. Read in terms of Egoyan’s prior formal and stylistic interests, it adds an important subtext to the film, deepening Trevor’s novel as it betrays its intent. Read in terms of auteurist production, it reads almost as a cry for help, a lifeline to the world he had left behind for the candyshop of Shepperton and the deep pockets of Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions (Felicity’s Journey is the only one of his films on which Egoyan did not also act as producer).

Although Ararat‘s $15 million budget provides one motivation for the distancing device of the film within a film, the fact that the film was an all-Canadian affair renders a different allegory, as Egoyan negotiated his Armenian heritage and community with an auteurist past in which that heritage and community had played a supporting, if nonetheless significant role. The casting of cultural icons such as Charles Aznavour and Eric Bogosian as the director and screenwriter neatly reveals the degree to which outside audiences had always assumed they were “French” and “American,” respectively, allowing them proudly to display their Armenian heritage, and demonstrating the invisibility of Armenia as a cultural marker in the same way that Canadians have always complained occurs with their own actors within Hollywood.33 That same maneuver, however, makes it all the more difficult not to read the rest of the film in the same extra-diegetic sense.

Consequently, when we find Egoyan leading men in the two most complex supporting roles — Bruce Greenwood (right) as Martin, the actor who plays Clarence Ussher, the ostensibly neutral eyewitness of the siege of Van; and Elias Koteas as Ali, the Turkish-Canadian gay partner of David’s son Philip who in Saroyan’s film plays the role of the “evil Turk” who orchestrates the massacre — we can also read those roles in terms of the auteurist past of Egoyan with which they are so closely identified. Each character has a key scene questioning the relationship between actor and role, past and present, and fiction and reality. Ali’s moment comes in the oft-cited scene where Raffi confronts him about Turkey’s role in the genocide, of which Ali had been unaware and about which he concludes, “This is a new country. So let’s just drop the fucking history and get on with it.” Martin’s comes in the equally pivotal scene in which Ani stumbles upon the set in the midst of filming and he confronts her, in character, with a list of atrocities, only to conclude, “Who the fuck are you?” Beyond the expressive impact of being the only two uses of the f-word in the entire film, the scenes are united as the twin climaxes of Egoyan’s need somehow to reconcile the cross-purposes of the film, and of the two families — his past and his métier — intersecting within it.

In contrast, the casting of venerable Canadian leading man Christopher Plummer and rising Québécoise star Marie-Josée Croze is unprecedented in Egoyan’s oeuvre and inexplicable in terms of its internal auteurist parameters. Rather, they seem motivated by a need or desire to reference every form of Canadian cinematic iconicity. If Greenwood and Koteas personify the English-Canadian, Toronto-based roots of Egoyan’s oeuvre, Plummer references the famously invisible Hollywood Canadian, apparently indistinguishable from his American colleagues. To be sure, the Toronto-born Plummer makes a brilliant foil for first-timer David Alpay’s Raffi in the quintessentially Egoyan airport customs scenes; his iconic presence bestows upon these scenes not just the allegorical weight of Armenian-Canadian versus English-Canadian, but the added burden of Armenia’s cinematic invisibility uneasily cross-fertilized with the fraught status of an independent Canadian auteur smuggling his familiar themes into the alien (yet known) territory of mainstream, big-budget filmmaking.

Croze’s role in the film is both more mysterious and less satisfying than Plummer’s. The most irritating and far-fetched bundle of issues and coincidences in a film built around them, Celia’s Québécoise identity seems to have been motivated only by some strange sense of completion. Her character is a laundry list of new Québécois film motifs — not surprising given Croze’s Genie- and Jutra-prize winning turn in Denis Villeneuve’s Maëlstrom (2000). From her stylish, sexy wardrobe and designer loft apartment to the subculture markers of psychological instability, casual nudity, drug dealing, and violently antisocial behavior, Celia has nothing to do with Egoyan’s prior catalog of characters and everything to do with the seductive but often empty art-house surrealism of Villeneuve, Jean-Claude Lauzon, and André Turpin. Add a further subtext somehow displacing the 1985 storming of the Turkish Embassy by three armed Armenian activists onto Raffi’s father and into Celia’s vandalism and the FLQ associations inevitably arising from her identity as lone (and violent) Québécoise in the film, and we have a half-baked cluster of associations whose range suggests the ambition of Ararat but whose refusal to jell suggests the film’s distance from a director’s oeuvre characterized by nothing so much as the extraordinary tightness of its multiple levels and fragments.34

As the pivot of the myriad themes, plots, and references, Arsinée Khanjian’s Ani is impossible to accept as a realistic character, but neither does she have the hieratic distance necessary to function as the pure allegory we might find in the films of Theo Angelopoulos or Sergei Paradjanov. Egoyan’s films have always struck a knife’s-edge balance between emotional authenticity and intellectual distance, the non-linear movement of the plot forcing the audience to bridge the gap between the characters’ deadened emotions and the trauma behind them. As Egoyan was fully aware, only personal trauma can be transmitted effectively in this way; unfortunately, there is no analogous representational mode for jumbling the trauma of an entire people.35 The codes proper to each mode sabotage the other, and the result is that the more a sequence such as Raffi and David’s confrontation in the airport is emotionally and intellectually satisfying in itself, the more inappropriate its application to the greater historical subject. Similarly, the more Egoyan insulates himself from criticism of exploitation with arguments that are compelling in intellectual terms, the more the viewer becomes irritated qua viewer. And here Ani, as the voice of truth — she is the one who protests at the film’s manipulation of reality in the service of emotional truth; she is the one who refuses to compromise her own fidelity to truthfulness in order to provide Celia or Raffi with the emotionally satisfying answers they crave; she is the one who explains Gorky’s erasure of his mother’s hands as a gesture to the inability of memory to do justice to the past — becomes ever shriller the more we know she is justified in everything she says.36 And our knowledge of Khanjian’s own background as Egoyan’s wife, linchpin of his own auteurist vision, and catalyst of the director’s own burgeoning awareness of his Armenian past only exacerbates this frustration. The self-consciousness that was a necessary evil of the early films and that was craftily subordinated to the diegetic requirements of Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter, andFelicia’s Journey rages out of control in the expansive vision of Ararat.

No wonder Egoyan chose to turn next to his most anonymous project to date in Where the Truth Lies, muting Khanjian, David Hemblen, Maury Chaykin, Don McKellar, and Gabrielle Rose to supporting roles to his Hollywood stars, as invisible to the casual viewer as any auteurist markings on the film as a whole. To be sure, there is a wicked irony in seeing Chaykin turn up as a Mafioso apologetically described in Lanny’s voiceover as “straight out of central casting,” and Khanjian, McKellar, and Rose as Lohman’s deep-pocketed publishers, worried sick their dirt will be trumped by Lanny’s tell-all memoir, the upstarts outdone by the ones who really know how it’s done. It’s just that it is an in-joke auteurist pleasure wholly extrinsic to the film as a whole.

Perhaps what is most fascinating about the popular turn in Egoyan’s career is that his own discourse about the films has remained as consistent and consistently intelligent as the cast and crew with which he has surrounded himself. The latter appear to have insulated him from a full awareness of the unevenness of the products of the partnership just as the former has insulated him from recognizing the growing inability of his brilliant intentions and exegeses fully to account for what actually shows up onscreen. The growing degree to which the auteur Egoyan is bracketed in his films by the greater world — financial, historical, cultural — around him thus mirrors the inevitable loss of control to which the auteur submits when he or she emerges from a cocoon of independence into the global marketplace of contemporary cinema. It is a testimony to Egoyan’s ability as a filmmaker that he has managed to preserve his identity as much as he has and has continued to make films of compelling intellectual fascination; however, this should not blind us to the fact that the primary reason we still go to his films and bestow them the critical attention we do is in ritualized compulsion to recover the extraordinary memory of the ones we saw in a now-lost past.

Epilogue: The Five Hundred Hats of Atom Egoyan

It is a peculiarity of auteurist studies of Egoyan’s oeuvre that they tend to elide the presence of non-auteurist works from the very beginning of the director’s career: CBC movies such as Paul Gross’s In This Corner (1985) and Gross Misconduct, and episodes of The Twilight Zone (1985), Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1985), and Friday the 13th (1987).37 The common assumption that this was work-for-pay is reinforced by the coincidence of its termination following the mainstream success of Exotica; a fitting endpoint would be the near deal to direct a conventional film noir with Warner Brothers that Egoyan eventually passed up in order to adapt The Sweet Hereafter. Nevertheless, the early work as director-for-hire must have played a role in preparing Egoyan for his superlative work with mainstream actors and the popular genres he tackled in Felicia’s Journey, Ararat, and Where the Truth Lies — a role he tacitly acknowledged in referring to Hitchcock as “the master of self-consciousness” while discussing the thrill of working with Martin Landau on Alfred Hitchcock Presents and hearing the venerable actor’s memories of North by Northwest.38

While Egoyan’s recent films have, for better or for worse, somehow synthesized the polar opposites of his early work, a new split has emerged between his big-budget cinematic productions and his ever-diversifying work as an economic, intellectual, and artistic force in Canadian culture at large. Egoyan’s work with opera began in 1996 with his staging of Salomé (right) for the COC, continuing in 1998 with the world premiere of Gavin Bryar’s Dr. Ox’s Experiment for London’s National Opera and Wagner’s Die Walküre for the COC in 2004, as well as the premiere of Elsewhereness,from his own libretto, in 1998. He also made the hour-long contribution Bach Cello Suite # 4: Sarabande to the award-winning TV series Yo Yo Ma: Inspired by Bach; his collaboration “Mystery” with The Tragically Hip-frontman Gordon Downie appears in Ararat as well as on Downie’s 2000 solo album “Coke Machine Glow.” The depth of Egoyan’s engagement with opera, classical music, and popular music has long borne fruit in his collaboration with composer Mychael Danna, who has scored every feature film since Family Viewing. It has equally provided an outlet for the experimental and non-narrative impulses that have ceased to play a formative role in the feature films.

Since 1995’s A Portrait of Arshile, Egoyan has exhibited nearly a dozen short films and installations in gallery settings ranging from the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin to the Venice Biennale to the Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal and the Power Plant in Toronto, as well as the site-specific installation “Steenbeckett” in the former Museum of Mankind in London.39 As with America, America, a combination of extracts from Elia Kazan’s film and personal footage exhibited at the 1997 Venice Biennale, A Portrait of Arshile played a formative role in the conception of Ararat, its highly personal and fragmented meditation on Gorky’s portrait and Egoyan and Khanjian’s baby Arshile transmuted into Ani’s strident art history lecturing.40

Other expositions have worked in the opposite direction, revisioning extracts of feature films such as Calendar, The Adjuster, and Felicia’s Journey in the context of the visual arts and the aesthetics of the installation. Evidence, a 19-minute video compilation of the surveillance shots of Hilditch’s victims from Felicia’s Journey, toured the world as part of the exhibition Notorious: Alfred Hitchcock and Contemporary Art, originating at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art in 1999. Extracted from the context of a mainstream narrative thriller, the component of Felicia’s Journey most indebted to the theoretical concerns that had made Egoyan the darling of media theorists found its way back to that original setting.

Subtitles, the collection of essays he co-edited with Ian Balfour, reads like a who’s who of the rarified world of art film and cultural theory, with contributions from Claire Denis, B. Ruby Rich, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Fredric Jameson, and Slavoj Žižek, the latter of which concludes in a timely homage to The Sweet Hereafter.41 While the collection includes a few pieces on the more popular aspects of subtitles and foreignness, its primary concern, reflected in the innovative production design mirroring the dimensions of the 1.66:1 aspect ratio of the widescreen frame, is the intransigent cultural critique of Egoyan’s early auteurism. Rather than historicized in terms of their different cultural signifying from their identification with art cinema in the 1960s to their current denotation of foreign, often fake, cultures in popular cinema and television, subtitles appear here for the most part as signs of a global alienation of language and culture, an intellectually fascinating but historically inert phenomenon. High art remains resolutely distinct from popular culture.

While work in the art and music world has allowed Egoyan to retain the avant-garde currency in which his films no longer participate, his new economic clout and cultural profile have opened up different doors for him, from serving on the jury of the Cannes Film Festival in 1996 to serving as executive producer to a half dozen Canadian features since 1996, and providing informal assistance on numerous others. In 2004, he opened a combination 52-seat cinema and bar designed by business partner Hussein Amarshi in the trendy Queen West neighborhood of Toronto. In addition to the high-concept café, the screening room is used to show alternative features and experimental shorts, including Egoyan and Khanjian’s own video work-in-progress, Citadel.42 Weighing in on the commercial thrust of Richard Stursberg’s tenure at Telefilm Canada as a respected authority on all things Canadian and cinematic, Egoyan has solidified a position of eminence within the culture in which he always figured himself as outsider even as his feature film production moves him further and further away from that very culture. Or, perhaps, indicates precisely the direction toward which that culture is moving.

Rather than achieving a unified auteurist vision of the new global culture in which his feature films circulate, Egoyan has diversified himself, fundamentally severing his mainstream filmmaking identity from an avant-garde figure whose caché he rigorously maintains. This is how he formulated the situation at the time of the release of Where the Truth Lies (right):

The middle film — something like The Adjuster, let’s say — is hard to do these days. Once you are involved at a certain budget level you have to perform in a different, perhaps more restrictive way. It seems it’s either bigger budget stuff or something totally handmade, like Citadel. That middle film is harder and harder to make.… Of course, it all depends on the story you want to tell.43

The replacement of a tension within his films by a dialectic of cultural production outside of them accurately characterizes Egoyan’s shift to the popular that began following The Adjuster. While his big-budget travails in the 21st century can furnish an object lesson of the dangers and temptations besetting the independent filmmaker in the global market, the ever-widening split in his oeuvre between the growing constraints of the big budget and the artistic ambition of the experimental suggests the provisional strategy he has adopted to weather the storm. We can only hope that Egoyan can find a way to achieve the synthesis between them that promised so much in the 1990s. Meanwhile, the brilliance of marginal work such as Krapp’s Last Tape and the Steenbeckett installation will have to balance the scattered pleasures and frequent irritations of the recent features.

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Lageira, Jacinto, Danièle Rivière, Paul Virilio, and Carole Desbarats, eds. Atom Egoyan. Paris: Dis Voir, 1994.

Lane, Anthony. “Worlds Apart: Far from Heaven and Ararat.” The New Yorker 78:35 (18 November 2002): 104-105. IIPA Full Text: cited 4 January 2006.

Lavery, David. “The Movie Artist: cited 5 January 2006.

The Making of Ararat. Dir. Michele Francis. Perf. Mychael Danna, Atom Egoyan, Robert Lantos. 2003. In bonus disk of Ararat. DVD. Miramax Home Entertainment. 2003.

McCarthy, Todd. “Where the Truth Lies.” Daily Variety (16 May 2005). LexisNexis Academic: cited December 2004.

McKay, John. “Already hot, Ararat skips spotlight: Atom Egoyan’s controversial film on Armenian genocide will be hors-concours at Cannes.” Montreal Gazette (25 April 2002): C8. LexisNexis Academic: cited December 2004.

McSorley, Tom. “How Do We Know What We Know? Atom Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies.” Take One 14:51 (September-December 2005): 20-4.

Ouzonian, Richard. “Dealing with the Ghosts of Genocide.” Toronto Star (5 September 2002): A01. Lexis-Nexis: cited December 2004.

Pevere, Geoff. “Difficult to Say: An Interview with Atom Egoyan.” In Egoyan 1995. 43-67.

———. “No Place Like Home: The Films of Atom Egoyan.” In Egoyan 1995. 9-42.

Pike, David L. “The Passing of Celluloid, The Endurance of the Image: Egoyan, “Steenbeckett,” and Krapp’s Last Tape.” In New Essays on Atom Egoyan. Eds. Monique Tschofen and Jennifer Burwell. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier UP: 2006. Forthcoming.

Porton, Richard. “Family Romances: An Interview with Atom Egoyan.” Cineaste 23:2 (1997): 8-15.

———. “The Politics of Denial: An Interview with Atom Egoyan.” Cineaste 25: 1 (December 1999): 39-41.

Romney, Jonathan. Atom Egoyan. BFI World Directors. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Rosen, Steven. “Hoskins, Egoyan, Make Journey Important.” Denver Post (19 November 1999): 2D. LexisNexis Academic: cited December 2004.

Schaefer, Stephen. “Egoyan Embarks on Dangerous, Adolescent Journey.” Boston Herald (21 November 1999): 051. LexisNexis Academic: cited December 2004.

Spaner, David. “Egoyan returns to his roots: His drama of Armenian genocide is the big Canadian film of Christmas season.” Vancouver Province (10 November 2002): B8. LexisNexis Academic: cited December 2004.

Stoffman, Judy. “A film, cup of joe, some chat; Screening room has 50 seats.” Toronto Star (29 September 2004): F01. LexisNexis: cited December 2004.

Stone, Jay. “Egoyan and the urge to forget: Memory, resolution are director’s themes in film, Ararat.”Ottawa Citizen (6 September 2002): D3. LexisNexis Academic: cited December 2004.

The Sweet Hereafter. Dir. Atom Egoyan. Perf. Ian Holm, Sarah Polley, Bruce Greenwood, Gabrielle Rose. Alliance Communications, 1997.

Trevor, William. Felicia’s Journey. New York: Penguin, 1994.

Tschofen, Monique. “Repetition, Compulsion, and Representation in Atom Egoyan’s Films.” North of Everything: English-Canadian Cinema: 1980 to 2000. Ed. William Beard and Gerald White. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2002. 166-183.

Weese, Katherine. “Family Stories: Gender and Discourse in Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter.”Narrative 10:1 (January 2002): 70-90.

Where the Truth Lies. Dir. Atom Egoyan. Perf. Kevin Bacon, Rachel Blanchard, Colin Firth, Alison Lohman. Serendipity Point Films, 2005.

Whyte, Murray. “Facing the Pain of a Past Long Hidden.” New York Times (17 November 2002): Arts and Leisure, Section 2, Column 1: 13. LexisNexis Academic: cited December 2004.