>> Canada’s most prominent filmmaker,
Atom Egoyan, on his new art installation,
a major retrospective, his Montreal ties
and the controversial Ararat

by MATTHEW HAYES

Atom Egoyan is known first and foremost as the man who is arguably the most famous and influential Canadian filmmaker working in the medium. His films have drawn international accolades, from the early Family Viewing (1987) to 1997’s The Sweet Hereafter, which brought Egoyan an Oscar nomination in the best adapted screenplay category.

What’s less known about Egoyan is his work in other media, from his direction of opera to his visual art and multimedia installation work. Early this year, Egoyan launched a multimedia show at London, England’s Museum of Mankind, titled Steenbeckett. In it, Egoyan meditated on memory, pre-digital technology (in the form of audiotape) and elaborated on the themes playwright Samuel Beckett explored in his ’58 play Krapp’s Last Tape. (Egoyan had already directed a made-for-TV version of the play last year, which starred John Hurt.)

Now, Egoyan is re-exploring many of those same themes in a new form, which will be presented at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (the show, titled Out of Order opens today). Egoyan, who is the Musée’s artist-in-residence this year, began advertising for potential local contributions to his show over a year ago. Ads in local newspapers and on the Internet asked people who owned reel-to-reel analogue recording devices to loan them to Egoyan’s show, while also recounting the last time they’d actually used the machines. The results, reports Egoyan, were amazing, and reflect thoughts and feelings of Montrealers in regards to technology and memory, and the relationship between the two.

Ironically enough, the past year and a half has found Egoyan steeped in his own controversy surrounding memory and the debate over history. When the filmmaker announced his plans to make Ararat, a film about the Armenian genocide of the early 20th century, the idea sent many into a tizzy. The Turkish government immediately denounced the plans, saying it intended to make its own film about the events Egoyan intended to tackle. The controversy itself was odd, considering that Egoyan’s work is generally entirely formally self-conscious, and that Egoyan has consistently questioned ideas around subjectivity and authorship in his work.

What with Egoyan and David Cronenberg being Toronto’s two leading auteurs, there was some question as to whose film would win the coveted opening-night spot at the Toronto International Film Festival, which begins next Thursday, Sept. 5. It was ultimately Ararat that would win out, nabbing the debut moment at the prestigious fest. (For the record, both Ararat and Cronenberg’s Spider received mixed reviews at their world premieres at Cannes.)

Apart from Out of Order, Ararat will have it’s premiere here at the New Film Fest in October. As well, the extensive Cinémathèque québécoise retrospective of Egoyan’s oeuvre begins to unreel on Sept. 5. Egoyan spoke to the Mirror from his Toronto home, discussing his new show, his ties to Montreal, what it’s like to look back at his early work and the fuss over Ararat.

Mirror: It seems there’s a lot of specificity to Montreal with this show…
Atom Egoyan: Yeah. It seemed it would have been a waste not to take advantage of saying something about the community. I do think that if you’re doing something as an invited artist, it’s really great to respond to the place you’re making the work in. I was really taken by the photographer who has everyone strip naked and inhabit the street. That work really inspired me in a way, this idea of being able to come in somehow, to have an idea but have the community be a part of the exhibition. In this case, it had to do with mediating a very private aspect of our lives: family voices, or things you’d collect on a domestic tape recorder. I loved the idea that the call out was publicized through the Internet or commercially accessible media outlets. What we were searching for was these very private recordings, and then what we wanted were people’s memories of the last time they remember using the machine. That’s become a really important part of the piece.

M: You also spent time here as a child, no?
AE: Yes, I did. In the back of my mind was the fact that I have this memory of being tape recorded as a child, when I was seven, by my uncle. A lot of my family lives in Montreal, so I was here a lot in the summer and I remember him taking out this machine and recording my voice. So we retrieved that track, and my voice as a seven year old singing “Doe, a Deer,” threads through the entire installation. So in a way it’s based entirely in the community, even my own memory of being a child in Montreal is invested in the piece. I have this fantasy idea that other communities can transport the idea of the piece and mount something similar. But as it stands, there’s something very specific to Montreal about the show.

Privileged memories

M: In a sense, it seems this is a show that’s co-authored by all of these participants…
AE: Oh it is, in a way. In particular there’s this monologue by Marie-France Marcil, which is just mind blowing. She delivered this 10-minute monologue which encapsulates everything I feel about memory, emotion and technology. It’s something I could have written if I were that good of a writer. She spills out this story about her relationship to her mother and how it was reflected through this machine. I won’t give it away, but it’s a tremendous bit of text. We felt very privileged to include that in the piece.

I just like the idea of presenting the work that was dependent on the participation of the people who live in the city in which it’s presented. If those people hadn’t responded, there wouldn’t be a piece.

M: What do you feel some of the ways that the shift to digital technology alters our sense of memory?
AE: There was a point in which the technology-and this show really makes this clear-there was a point where the machines that we used to record to memories were somehow extensions of our own bodies. There were things that had character and form and shape. We were aware of the process involved in transcribing the memories. If the machines would break down, we could relate to it in terms of our own bodies: things snapping or getting jammed or springs being slackened. There was something very reassuring in a sense. So even though we surrendered vital parts of our memory to this form of transcription, it was somehow blessed with our own frailty of our own memory. They reflected something about our own attitude; there was something corporeal about the analogue system. As opposed to digital, which seems a complete mystery to us. I think now we completely abstract the storage system. We don’t have the same physical relationship to the instruments we use in digital transcription that we did to analogue.

Which is a lot of what Krapp’s Last Tape is about, at least in my interpretation of filming it. I wanted to stress the physical aspect of the machine. There’s a point at which John Hurt discusses being on the boat with this lost love, there’s a line where he says, “We lay there without moving, but underneath us everything moved and moved us gently back and forth.” It’s a beautiful line. At that point, Hurt is actually caressing this machine-it’s a very tender gesture. You could do that with those machines. It’s something you wouldn’t do with a digital piece of technology. Part of making a piece of art, of course, is that you exaggerate. I don’t know how big of an issue it is in the real world. It’s something that works metaphorically.

Admiring the absurd

M: When did you first connect with Beckett’s play?
AE: When I was really young. I remember writing a play for the Victoria Drama Festival when I was 13 or 14, and the adjudicator mentioned Ionesco and Beckett and I fell in love with theatre of the absurd, and it’s been a monumental influence on my stuff. Long before I knew what it was about. But I think I’ve always been attracted to the way it was able to convey a sense of despair. If you look at Edward Albee’s plays of that period, American Dream, The Sandbox, those are all of that absurdist tradition. But I don’t find Krapp’s Last Tape absurdist, because it’s probably the most realistic play that Beckett wrote, and it’s in real time. My dramatic interpretation was to make it very real, a real man, a real room-not to suspend it in a black space, as Beckett probably would have done. You can take a very realistic approach to the direction of these works, and sometimes reinvest them with a power we’d forgotten they had.

M: I’m wondering in terms of memory and technology, what do you think when you look back at your first feature, Next of Kin? Do you ever have a frisson when you look back at your early work?
AE: I’m a lot kinder to it than I was at the time. I was really angry about that film because I felt it was completely misinterpreted. I was paraded around as the prize pony of multiculturalism for a couple of years. There was something about the style of the film that worked completely opposite to the way that I thought it would. This hand-held camera, which was supposed to create a real sense of disturbance, actually made it look like cinéma vérité. It ended up looking like a lot of those NFB docu-dramas that I was trying to run away from as my whole generation did at that point.

So Family Viewing [Egoyan’s next feature] became an extreme formal experiment where I didn’t want there to be any doubts as to what my intentions were. When I look at Next of Kin now, though, I’m a lot kinder to it.

M: You should be. I love that film.
AE: I love the beginning of it and it’s got a great heart, a great spirit. I think there’s this crucial moment in it when he meets the Armenian family and it switches to hand-held, that did something completely the opposite of what I intended, and probably made the film stronger as a result [laughs]. I guess that surprised me. But the performances are great and the emotionality of the film is really beautiful.

M: And then Family Viewing got downright chilly…
AE: Yeah. Because I didn’t want there to be any question about it. I’m really proud of Family Viewing. I think that’s one of my favourites of my films. That’s dealing with a lot of personal material. I’m surprised I was able to make that film at that point in my life.

Techno-surprises

M: Why were you surprised?
AE: Just because there’s a clarity and a precision to it and it seemed to be able to fulfill this incredible wish fantasy of being able to reclaim something I no longer had access to. I think that it was able to say something about technology, the idea of generations of tape relating to generations of a family, this idea of erasure and cultural erasure and personal erasure. Being able to play those issues at different levels, I think it came together quite well in that movie.

M: I find it kind of ironic that you’ve done this installation about memory and technology right now. Your most recent film, Ararat, in a sense, you’ve entered into this massive debate about collective memory and history. I read that you were quite overwhelmed by the response to the film…
AE: All I’ll say, is that I think all the issues surrounding that issue are built into the story itself. I think a lot of people have begun a level of discourse before they’ve seen the movie. Have you seen the movie yet?

M: No, not yet.
AE: I think the film has to be seen to even begin a discussion. It exists right now in people’s imagination in such a bizarre way. I was surprised, yes, that it created so much controversy, just because a film was being made about the subject. I find that kind of appalling. It sort of says something about how dysfunctional that situation is. I mean, the denial has been so absolute, that it can arouse this much anger. One has to wonder why has it whipped up this frenzy, if there wasn’t something that was being denied. It’s an obvious point, but one that’s raised by the fuss.

M: Scorsese faced it with the protests against Last Temptation of Christ. When the protesters were asked about it, they admitted that none of them had actually seen the movie.
AE: It is very strange, and it says something about the power of the medium. This almost atavistic approach we still have 100 years later to the making of images, it’s quite bizarre. I wonder how different we are sometimes from those people who first saw the Lumière train pulling into the station. :

The installation Atom Egoyan: Out of Order opens today, Aug. 29, at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and runs until Oct. 20. A major retrospective of the films of Atom Egoyan begins at the Cinémathèque québécoise next Friday, Sept. 5 and runs until Sept. 21. Ararat will have its Quebec premiere at the New Film Festival in October :