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Performing Arts History & Criticism

Image and Territory

Essays on Atom Egoyan

edited by Jennifer Burwell & Monique Tschofen

Publisher
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Initial publish date
Oct 2006
Category
History & Criticism, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Film & Video
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9780889205291
    Publish Date
    Oct 2006
    List Price
    $38.95
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780889204874
    Publish Date
    Oct 2006
    List Price
    $41.99

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Description

In a culture that often understands formal experimentation or theoretical argument to be antithetical to pleasure, Atom Egoyan has nevertheless consistently appealed to wide audiences around the world. If films like The Adjuster, Calendar, Exotica, and The Sweet Hereafter have ensured him international cult status as one of the most revered of all contemporary directors, Egoyan’s forays into installation art and opera have provided evidence of his versatility and confirmed his talents.
Image and Territory: Essays on Atom Egoyan is both scholarly and accessible. Indispensable for the scholar, student, and fan, this collection of new essays and interviews from leading film and media scholars unpacks the central arguments, tensions, and paradoxes of his work and traces their evolution. It also locates his work within larger intellectual and artistic currents in order to consider how he takes up and answers critical debates in politics, philosophy, and aesthetics. Most importantly, it addresses how his work is both intellectually engaging and emotionally moving.

About the authors

Jennifer Burwell is an associate professor in the Department of English at Ryerson University and author of Notes on Nowhere: Feminism, Utopian Logic, and Social Transformation. Burwell’s current research explores the relationships among discursive logics, communications technologies, and the historical development of a market economy.

Jennifer Burwell's profile page

Monique Tschofen is an associate professor in the English department at Ryerson University, Toronto. She is editor of Kristjana Gunnars: Essays on Her Work, and the author of articles and book chapters on Atom Egoyan, Robert Lepage, Anne Carson, and other Canadian artists. She is currently working on a monograph about early Canadian torture narratives.
Jennifer Burwell is an associate professor in the Department of English at Ryerson University and author of Notes on Nowhere: Feminism, Utopian Logic, and Social Transformation. Burwell’s current research explores the relationships among discursive logics, communications technologies, and the historical development of a market economy.

Monique Tschofen's profile page

Excerpt: Image and Territory: Essays on Atom Egoyan (edited by Jennifer Burwell & Monique Tschofen)

Excerpt from Image and Territory: Essays on Atom Egoyan edited by Monique Tschofen and Jennifer Burwell

From the Introduction

Throughout his career, Atom Egoyan has shown himself to possess the rarest kind of singularity. As Jonathan Romney puts it, Egoyan´s “preoccupations and tropes have been so consistent that he's practically created his own genre” (1995, 8). Hrag Vartanian adds,”Egoyanesque has become a word to film aficionados, commonly understood to mean a cinematic moment that examines sexuality, technology and alienation in the modern world” (2004). For this singularity, Egoyan is widely hailed as a true auteur­­someone carrying on the legacy of the European art-house traditions of Bergman, Godard, and Truffaut. Certainly, his work bears a most recognizable signature­­there is no confusing an Egoyan work with anyone else´s. Like his art-house predecessors, Egoyan clearly intends that his work be, as Dudley Andrew puts it,”read rather than consumed,” that is, viewed meditatively, reflected upon, and discussed (2000, 24). And indeed, in this world in which filmmaking has become commonplacewhere, as Egoyan has said,”what used to be a rarified activity is now available to anyone with a digital camera and a computer” (2001b, 18) he intends through much of his work to recall an earlier image culture in which artists had an ability to produce something that gained its power precisely through its rarity. 1

Egoyan has revealed that he is very aware, however, of the dangers inherent in his wish to capture the magic and rarity of the moving image. He does not mean to promote a naïve nostalgia for more innocent times when filmmakers were blindly worshiped. Rather, he seeks to remember a time that, if not more cynical, was at least more conscious of the powers of image-makers. Egoyan has always understood that the cinema has the power to make people believe that what they are seeing is real, and that this makes it an ideal instrument for propaganda (Egoyan 2004b, 888). 2 He has also observed that in different ways, when other storytelling and representational arts strive to construct the real, they too carry the potential to distort and manipulate, to lie and deny. Seeking to draw attention to the conundrum that the very tools we use to represent ourselves to the world and to translate the world back to ourselves might be deceitful and dangerous, he has consistently tried to lay bare the mechanisms of representational practices, showing, as he puts it,”the frame as well as the picture” (Romney 1999, 6). The central Egoyanesque themes revolving around trauma such as incest, violation, erasure, and forgetting--all of which are elaborated upon by the essays in this volume--thus emerge directly from the place where the logic of representational systems and the agency of individual subjects collide.

A few examples from Egoyan´s works will show what we mean here. In The Sweet Hereafter (1997), a father pictures his daughter as a beautiful rock star. Seduced by this image of herself, the daughter complies with her own violation until she realizes that she never resembled this image. Having once been a victim of the art of misrepresentation, she appropriates its tactics in order to rupture other deceptions and fictions. In The Adjuster (1991), a film censor is molested by her colleague while violent pornography plays on the screen before them and another colleague watches on voyeuristically. She frightens them both by seizing her aggressor´s hand as if about to act out the kinds of scenarios they are beholding, and thus exposes the scenes sadistic logic, rendering her assailants impotent. In yet another film, Ararat (2002), an art historian lectures about the many ways destruction is part of a painting by artist Arshile Gorky, in its genesis as well as in its execution. Her exegesis, which sets this one work on a pedestal above all others, suggests that the image serves as a “mirror” to history, offering what she calls a “'sacred code” that translates the traumatic history of the destruction of her own and the artist´s people. Traumatized by the loss of her father, and seeking to mirror a more private history of destruction, the historian´s stepdaughter constructs an alternative code to articulate her personal pain by seeking to destroy the sacred painting. All of Egoyans human traumas are similarly inextricably bound by and caught up in the logic of the media that represent them. As in Escher´s famous drawing of the hand drawing the hand, in Egoyan's works there are only pictures and frames--nothing is outside of the realm of representation. And yet, as in the examples above, if sometimes this means that his subjects become victims of histories scripted for them, other times this means that his subjects transform the logic of these scripts and are, themselves, transformed for the better.

Egoyan´s output in a wide range of media has shaped the way he conceives the relationships different media can provoke between producers and consumers of cultural products. As a precocious young man living in Victoria, Canada, Egoyan was, by the age of thirteen, not only familiar with but thoughtfully experimenting with the premises of the theatre of the absurd--Ionesco, Genet, Beckett, Pinter, and Adamov--as well as with the British absurdist humour of Monty Python (Egoyan 2004a, 68). 3 In the dozens of plays he has written and that are available in the archive--at least ten of which were mounted on stage, often under his own direction--Egoyan clearly announces the core issues his later work pursues: immigration, dispossession, and placelessness; history, memory, and forgetting; and that highly charged and aestheticized tension between intimacy and violation.

Editorial Reviews

The editors' introductions to each section are particularly smart and insightful, identifying Egoyan's chief preoccupations as an artist in terms of trauma, absence, substitution, displacement, denial, inversion, and negation.

Canadian Literature, 196, Spring 2008

''An excellent book; each of the essays is well thought out and deals with complex issues in an exemplary academic matter.... I would highly recommend the book to anyone interested in Egoyan's films and in the many contradictions and paradoxes of postmodern life that he evokes.''

Topia, 19, June 2008

Editors Tschofen and Burwell have divided their book into four sections ... each preceded by a thoughtful introduction by the co-editors, and concluding with the most complete Egoyan filmography yet published in a non-bibliographical study. This is an impressively thoughtful assemblage of texts.... Tschofen and Burwell also deserve credit for relying almost exclusively on Canadian critics for input.... Atom Egoyan is nor more generically North American than Ingmar Bergman is generically European.... Image and Territory is both useful and impressive, and belongs on the shelf of any cinephile interested in the work of the king of Armenian Canadian directors.

CHOICE, July 2007

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