In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Atom Egoyan by Emma Wilson
  • Jennifer Burwell (bio)
Emma Wilson. Atom Egoyan. University of Illinois Press. 2009. xvi, 168. US$22.00

Much of the existing criticism on Atom Egoyan focuses on the related dynamics of loss, mourning, trauma, and nostalgia, woven through the consideration of how a diasporic sensibility inflects his work. Well-worked secondary themes include an examination of technology as mediator and fetish object, and sexuality as a means of misplaced control. In her 2009 monograph Atom Egoyan, part of the Contemporary Film Directors series edited by James Naremore, Emma Wilson thoughtfully addresses each of these critical preoccupations. Wilson’s main contribution, however, is to take these traditional concerns and filter them through a sustained analysis of familial relations: ‘families,’ she writes, ‘defamiliarized through loss or desire, haunted by collective memory and traumatic heritage, incestuous or estranged – are my objects of inquiry.’ In a series of eloquent close readings, Wilson highlights the affective charge behind how Egoyan’s characters construct and reconstruct families and how they manage a longing for home and homeland, express feelings of estrangement and absence, and suffer from the dual sensations of entrapment and enclosure.

While Wilson is alert to the sexual tension and displaced desire that frequently emerge as problematics in Egoyan’s films, she is interested in sensuality as much as sexuality – sensuality as expressed in and through the characters’ interactions, but also as instantiated in the films themselves. [End Page 590] This is consistent with her focus on what she calls the ‘haptic’ qualities of the films themselves: for example, she uncovers the sensuality in ‘the mingled languor and tension of the images’ in The Adjuster. Wilson’s close attention to the camera’s relationship with the characters intensifies our sense of both the palpable materiality of Egoyan’s films and our own relationship to story and structure. By virtue of the films’ narrative fissures, gaps, and repetitions, Wilson argues, viewers are invited and sometimes compelled to engage viscerally and emotionally in the process of interpretation – to bear witness, on the one hand, but also to face their own implication in or subjection to the characters’ obsessions or delusions. At the same time, and despite Egoyan’s regular invocation of feelings of guilt, alienation, or disorientation, Wilson sees Egoyan’s films as potentially therapeutic for both the characters and the viewer. For Wilson, Egoyan’s films are ultimately redemptive and healing – if not always or entirely for the characters, then on the level of structure and theme, which combine to create of the work a ‘satisfying and soothing whole.’

At points Wilson forges insightful links between the films, and her book would have benefited from further attention throughout to thematic and narrative continuities across Egoyan’s corpus. Although she does occasionally convey a sense of how the themes developed in individual films build upon former works, Wilson falls just short of giving us a sense of an oeuvre, and it is frequently left to readers to make their own associations between works. Foregrounding these links seems particularly important in light of the fact that there is no summary conclusion at the end of the book that could have served to tie the works together. Throughout, Wilson relies on a few favoured critics to whom she turns for elaboration or illustration of her points, including Hamid Naficy, Jonathan Romney, Svetlana Boym, and Slavoy Zizek, and although she does make productive use of others such as Derrida, Harcourt, and bell hooks, her analysis might have benefited from wider use of the available critical material.

Egoyan has always been extremely reflective about his work, and one welcomes the many references to Egoyan’s statements that complement Wilson’s interpretations. Her own interview with Egoyan at the end rounds out the inclusion of Egoyan’s self-analysis, and her questions at times provoke Egoyan to consider aspects of his own work that he had previously neglected. Wilson is clearly a great admirer of Egoyan, and this lends to her interpretation a delicacy and care that bears witness to the multidimensional subtlety of Egoyan’s films. She has a keen sense of narrative structure, and her reading of Ararat in this regard is...

pdf

Share