ATOM EGOYAN WAS ONE OF THE first directors who--long before the advent of digital technology--reflected deeply on video. He did so in order to expand the frontiers of what is considered the 'visible world' and, above all, to extend and reformulate the concept of memory. Less preoccupied than his Canadian compatriot, David Cronenberg, with the physical mutations that technology inflicts on our bodies, Egoyan insisted on another way of conceiving technology--above all, on the basis of its proliferation of images, which effect not so much the body at an organic level, but the brain. With Egoyan, we enter into the terrain of perception. The protagonists of Egoyan's early features are creatures who sleepwalk between the illusion and reality of the image, between neurosis and psychosis, between obsession and perversion, between desire, drives and alienation. Recall the censor who records the images that she bans in order to give them to her sister in The Adjuster (1991); or the hotel employee who looks over and over at the exploitation videos that feature the man she loves in Speaking Parts (1989); or the photographer whose only trace of his wife (who has abandoned him for a man in their homeland) is a video that shows them together, endlessly repeated in Calendar (1992); or the man who films himself in the middle of a sexual act over the image of his children in Family Viewing (1987). Not to mention the mise en abyme of Exotica (1994), one of the darkest in cinema history, in which a father, accused of murdering his daughter, gazes at the video of her playing the piano, when a thirty-five millimetre image of a yellow field appears--the place where her body was found. [Graphic omitted]In various ways, all these films address the transformations in subjectivity brought about by the explosion of portable cameras--less 'auratic' than the thirty-five millimetre apparatus--which transforms experience and the mind to the extent that some reminiscences become less like living memories and more like 'screen memories', like pieces of memory stored on a videotape. Of Armenian origin, Egoyan's family emigrated to Canada because of the persecutions that Nasser's dictatorship committed against the Armenian population in Egypt. His latest film, Ararat (2002), recounts a moment in a life of an Arts teacher, Ani (Arsinee Khanjian), who is a widow: her husband died trying to kill a Turkish Diplomat. Ani's son, Raffi (David Alpay), is engaged to a girl whose father has killed himself a few years previously, when Ani (his lover at the time) told him that she had another man. Meanwhile, an Armenian film-maker, Edouard Saroyan (Charles Aznavour), is shooting his movie (also called Ararat) in the city of Van, about the Armenian Genocide during the First World War. The link between all these characters is the figure of the real-life painter Arshile Gorki (Simon Abkarian). Ani has written a book about the relation between Gorki's work and the Genocide and, because of this, is asked to be a consultant on Saroyan's movie. In the middle of all this, we find a policeman, David (Christopher Plummer), soon to retire from the narcotics division at Toronto Airport, and his son, Philip (Brent Carver), who works in the Museum where the most famous Gorki painting, Mother and Son, is displayed. [Graphic omitted]As in his immediately preceding features, The Sweet Hereafter (1997) and Felicia "s Journey (1999), Egoyan in Ararat, to some extent abandons the experimentation employed in his first movies, in order to tell the story in a more conventional way. Thus, while a collage structure is perceptible, temporal fractures and 'crystal images' disappear in favour of clearly marked flashbacks, an organic space, and shot/reverse-shots. Experimentation occurs here at the level of a Brechtian distanciation or self-reflexive gesture, because such devices work to comment on the choices and worries of Egoyan himself, at the moment when he decided to make Ararat--the first of his films to explicitly address the Armenian Genocide. Of the various distancing, reflexive techniques in Ararat, the most notable is the 'film within a film'--a device which may seem overly familiar to some viewers, but which here acquires a special force in its relation to both Gorki's painting and Raffi's video. Because Saroyan's movie stands for the mainstream representation of the Armenian Genocide, and in order to exorcise the phantasm that his own Ararat might enter international film culture in a complacent manner--a la Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful--Egoyan puts this phantasm inside his movie. No doubt the climax of this exorcism is when Saroyan, his star, Martin (Bruce Greenwood, excellent as always), the scriptwriter Rouben (Eric Bogosian) and Ani arrive in a limousine where the international premiere of the film is about to take place. The movie that Egoyan makes about the Armenian Genocide is like the painting Mother and Son: it is a movie that finishes without ending, a movie like the actively unmade hands in Gorki's painting, a movie that shows the empty spaces, the fissures. A movie, in other words, that is like Raffi's video. [Graphic omitted]This is the 'thin red line' on which Egoyan's Ararat sits. A line that, more than offering answers, enables the posing of questions about hate, love, art, cinema, land and--as always--memory. Thus, all Egoyan's films talk about the Genocide--if we choose to see it. In one of the most unforgettable moments of Calendar--his only other film to date in an Armenian setting--the main character is filming his lover. Suddenly, the camera moves over to the off-screen space and stays there. Then, into this frame comes the lover. In Raffi's video there is a similar moment: he films a temple and then moves the camera to frame another space. Ararat's truth can be found in this framing and reframing, in the union of both these off-screen spaces in Calendar and Raffi's video. Interview with Atom Egoyan Lorena Cancela: Considering the structure of Ararat, with its three films (yours, Saroyan's and Raffi's), for me one of its main questions becomes: how can we give an account of such a horrific event as the Armenian Genocide? [Graphic omitted]Atom Egoyan: I think that you are correct in saying that we have three films running simultaneously. We also have Ani's book, and the painting. All these objects are being made by people who are trying to give an account. All these objects are waiting for interpretation. Gorki's painting was for many years in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, but they didn't interpret it properly. They didn't understand his background, and the story he told. Aznavour's film, as we see from its images, is bound to be dismissed as propaganda. It's almost old fashioned, it should have been made long ago. Raffi's video is extremely marginal. No one is likely to watch it. Except, this one night, he had a viewer (David) who invested himself in this image, because of his own personal need. So it's not just the question of making the object (for instance, the film). It has to be viewed in the right way, with commitment. The viewer has to trust the reason why it's being expressed. [Graphic omitted]The reason why Saroyan is telling the story is a little suspicious. He feels a responsibility to his mother, these images are to commemorate her. But I wonder whether or not they are directly connected to him. He seems to be impatient, even unsure about what he's filming. On the other hand, Raffi tries to make this very simple account, he wants to see what's there. This personal diary that he's speaking to his mother is probably more authentic than all those tableaux images of Saroyan. [Graphic omitted]So, it's a reflection on: at what point are you able to give an account of your experience? It's not only a question of having the municate that. At several points, we see people needing to explain something by how someone else sees it. For example, the poem that Raffi is reading about the burning of the brides. This poem is very famous in Armenia, but it's based on a German woman's view of the event. So, it's a witness who's speaking; then the poet writes the poem; then Rouben the scriptwriter writes the scene based on the poem; the director then shoots the scene based on Rouben's screenplay; the actors are interpreting it; Raffi is watching it on the set; and then he's telling it to a customs agent. There are so many different layers. And very often these moments are mediated by other sources. Phantasms, unconscious images, what Gilles Deleuze called time-images--these always circulate in your films. I am particularly struck by the connection, in this regard, between Ararat and Calendar-especially at the moments where there is a similar gesture of a camera reframing a space. It is very emotional for me, because people say that the images look like I am shooting in the same place. But in fact Calendar was shot entirely in Armenia, and Ararat is shot entirely in Turkey--even though the architecture is the same, because at one time these two territories were united. But they are not anymore; for political reasons they're divided. So there is this link between the two films--because both are motivated by someone who's lothe two films--because both are motivated by someone who's looking for something more than what's there. An image is always more than an image. I've been reading, for my work on directing Wagner's opera Die Nibelungen, about his influences in nineteenth century philosophy--Kant and his ideas of the noumenal and the phenomenal. The camera movement is very much this idea of saying that, in a system of observing reality, there's a whole other reality which is determined only by the frame of reference. In that moment with the camera, all our sensory energies are directed to this particular frame. But this idea of someone leaving that, and entering into a whole other reality that no one will able to perceive at that moment, is very profound. And more than any other instrument, perhaps the film camera allows us to investigate this in a specific way. Now there's a whole area of installation work which I've been very intrigued with, where we are allowed to physically confront this notion in spaces as well. Especially when the structure is based on an accumulation of experience which may or may not be available to the character, because of the denial of that experience--not necessarily politically, but in terms of suppressed memory. Sometimes we suppress memory, and other times memory is suppressed for us by someone else. I think that, in both cases, the trauma is very profound, and it certainly can be transmitted from one generation to the other. This connects for me with the idea of time levels in your films--especially Exotica. I've always wondered about one shot in that film: the yellow field that returns over and over. It seems that this image belongs to nobody in the story. Someone once told me that she believed this image belonged to the father, who was the real murderer of his own daughter. The father was accused of this, but I never believed it. She argued, it's his image on an unconscious level. I'm always aware that in many of my dramas there is a missing character, somebody who is not there--not as much recently, but in my early films: in Family Viewing there is the missing mother, in Speaking Parts the missing brother, in Exotica it's the spirit of this girl who is absent. Maybe I'd say that the field is more the point of view of the daughter's spirit, not literally that of the murderer. I never thought that Francis could do that. I think he is playing out this fantasy with Cristina and it's very dangerous. It's a therapy they've constructed without even being aware of it. They've gone into this strange role playing in the club, and no one is controlling it. So he's playing out this fantasy or nightmare, but I don't think he can be the murderer. He is trying to imagine how someone could do that, but I don't think he's confessing to her. I never intended it that way. How can images affect our memory, our perception? In our culture it affects us most profoundly by suggesting that we don't need memory, that we can surrender the role of memory to technology. There is an assurance in this--a feeling that we don't need to take as much responsibility for what we remember because that has been handed to something else. But the problem is that there is nothing organic about the way memory is stored in technology. There is no forgiveness, and there is certainly no room for compensation. It's very literal. It's also vulnerable, metaphorically, to the way it's stored, to who has control of keeping it. Since it's an artifact that can also be manipulated in a certain way, it can be used to falsify in ways that are almost imperceptible. Technology has the ability to enhance our experience, but also to trivialize it at the same time. Are you interested in any special filmmaker at the moment? The classic film-makers are a huge inspiration. But I'm also interested in my own generation, film-makers like Todd Haynes and Todd Solondz. And Abbas Kiarostami, I think he's magnificent. He's dealing with issues of representation, but he does it in such an effortless way. I wasn't aware until recently of how much of Iranian cinema is based on aspects of representation, on Shiite religious ceremonies. In many of these ceremonies, people in the village are suddenly transfigured into other characters. Kiarostami's Close-Up (1990) is, to me, a remarkable piece of work. The way I formulated All (Elias Koteas) in Ararat, as being somebody who becomes a monster, whom we then have to confront, and yet we know he is not this character--this reading of how something is represented, and the levels of responsibility that we assign to this--a direct link can be made to Close-Up, with its relation between the character and the director. It's a very complex film. For Ararat I looked at many films that dealt with film-making, from the films of Kiarostami up to the films of Vincente Minnelli, Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963), films by Fassbinder, Weeders, as well as Pasolini's La Ricotta (1963). There's a whole tradition of films that deal with film-making; I think it's almost a genre in itself, and a very rich one. The persistence of this genre is fascinating in a culture like Iran's, which is so concerned with the constraints of representation. Do you know the work of Shirin Neshat? It's so exciting; she's an Iranian artist working in gallery installation art. (1) How do you think cinephilia can be constructed now?. I came from a generation that is able, through cinephilia, to make these references and be fascinated by the texture of images. I think we are now in a time where these divisions are becoming more blurred. When I made Speaking Parts, the use of video contrasting with the use of film was very clear. We are now entering a phase where texture is not read as easily. There is no longer this ability to look at a film and analyse the origin of its sources. So, I think that what was fascinating to me about Ararat was net so much the nature of the texture but the means of production: Saroyan's film is a grand epic; the way it's filmed, the use of tableaux, costume and spectacle is very different in nature from Raffi's video, which is without spectacle. What is actually being shot is more important than the texture of the medium itself. What you say reminds me of the book Movie Mutations, where Alex Howarth says of your early films that there is a work with mixed textures, and also with a mix of music, sound against image ... (2) In Ararat, I deal with the issue of a 'pure source' of music. For instance, in an image at the beginning, you hear the playing of folk instruments like the duduk, a flute. Then suddenly it's mutated into a Western orchestral interpretation. We are playing between the use of voice, or a native instrument, and the interpretation of that. It is an important part of the musical conception and construction of the piece. In Felicia's Journey I'm dealing with actual sonic corruption, at moments the orchestral sound becomes degraded and distorted, the tonality is deconstructed. The composer Mychael Danna and I--because I'm a musician as well--are very concerned about the architecture of the score. The most complicated scores are Exotica and Ararat. A final question: why did you choose the Leonard Cohen song 'Everybody Knows' for Exotica? Because that song is about communal knowledge: everybody knows and yet nobody admits, nobody talks. These are common truths, but they're not acknowledged. It was an interesting song to place in the context of that story, where you have a community of people who know about this event, but they don't recognize it communally-they're all connected to it, but they don't even understand how connected they are. So, it's ironic. The point is, you allow yourself to acknowledge. That song is very specific: there are some very funny sections in it about what people acknowledge of what they understand about what someone else is doing. This interview was recorded at the Hotel Emperador, Buenos Aires, 29 May 2003. Endnotes (1) Atom Egoyan, 'Turbulent', Filmmaker, Fall 2001, www.filmmakermagazine.com/fall2001/ reports/turbulent.html (2) Adrian Martin and Jonathan Rosenbaum (eds), Movie Mutations, London, British Film Institute, 2003. Lorena Cancela teaches cinema and aesthetics in Buenos Aires, and is currently writing the books, New Argentinean Cinema and Interviews with Film Masters.