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Reviewed by:
  • Image and Territory: Essays on Atom Egoyan
  • Noreen Golfman (bio)
Monique Tschofen and Jennifer Burwell, editors. Image and Territory: Essays on Atom Egoyan. Wilfrid Laurier University Press. vii, 417. $29.95

Discussing his interest in Armenian artist Arshile Gorky, Atom Egoyan observes that he is ‘drawn to . . . works that are more open to interpretation.’ Egoyan holds the title of most intellectual feature filmmaker in English Canada. His work, from the seventies through to his 2005 feature, Where the Truth Lies, has always courted the ambiguity of complexity. At last, therefore, we have a collection of essays dedicated to the openness of interpretive possibilities.

Editors Monique Tschofen and Jennifer Burwell have ambitiously assembled what is in effect an encyclopedic volume about Egoyan, in part voiced by the man himself. This collection includes not only a range of scholarly essays on his most acclaimed, reviewed, and, no doubt, taught feature films but also several pieces on Egoyan’s contributions to other genres, such as opera and installations, as well as a filmography, a comprehensive bibliography, and several interviews with the auteur. With the subject of the collection still conveniently alive and [End Page 465] keen to comment on his work and influences, Image and Territory has the incremental effect of a conversation with an artist who is eager to know what everyone is saying about him, even while he often flirts with what one essayist smartly calls a ‘willful inaccessibility.’

Egoyan would likely be pleased with the seriousness with which the essayists confront his creative output, as well as with the reach of their scholarship. As open to interpretation as many of Egoyan’s works are, especially his feature films, what emerges in this collection is a solid set of keywords that form a valuable chain of meaning: alienation, technology, doubleness, substitution, immigration, memory, loss, exile, diaspora, identity, ethnicity, family, and incest. These nouns recur throughout the volume with varying degrees of emphasis, depending on the film or work in question, but ultimately they cohere to an understanding of the filmmaker as an artist preoccupied with representations of individual, social, and cultural dysfunction. Nothing less is to be expected from a man who repeatedly cites absurdist theatre and Beckett as his major influences.

As familiar as these keywords are to anyone who follows Egoyan’s work, most of the essays selected for this volume offer refreshing perspectives on his complex narrative structures. The editors frame each of the major sections around dominant preoccupations. The first of these takes up the familiar theme of media technologies, as essay after essay explores Egoyan’s fascination with how we negotiate the world, often badly, through mediated images of it. William Beard’s reading of The Adjuster is an especially lucid commentary on this vexingly cold fish of a film, offering readers a firm grasp of its witty strategies, while fruitfully linking its thematics to Family Viewing and Speaking Parts. David L. Pike is provocative in questioning Egoyan’s complicity with the technologies he harnesses, inviting us to consider how the filmmaker can escape the ‘cold and unfeeling dissections of postmodern anomie’ without falling for the old traps of mainstream emotionalism.

The second section of the collection focuses specifically on Egoyan’s relationship to his Armenian heritage, especially as played out in Next of Kin, Calendar, and Ararat. Contributors Lisa Siraganian and Nellie Hogikyan write persuasively on the centrality of Armenian identity and family loss respectively, while Batia Boe Stolar extends the specificity of ethnicity to a general consideration of immigrant or outsider experience in the context of the wasp dominant.

The third section brings us up to ‘pathologies’ and ‘ontologies of the visual,’ inviting us to consider the family as a site of repressed and even complicit illicit desire, perversions, and voyeuristic impulses that, not surprisingly, do not serve us well. The Sweet Hereafter, Felicia’s Journey, and Exotica implicitly comprise a trilogy of shared concerns, extending themes in earlier films to much darker places. [End Page 466]

The essays on the feature films most of us teach and talk about are probably of most interest, but by including pieces on Egoyan’s experiments with music, opera, and art the editors open us...

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