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Transcript of the John Tusa Interview with film maker Atom Egoyan Ask a film critic or those who go to film festivals or those who go to movie art houses and all will instantly recognise the name and know the work of Atom Egoyan. Ask the average movie goer to a cinema multiplex and they might look more puzzled, which is odd in one way. Egoyan has made more than twenty films of which at least five have won recognition and prizes around the world. Films such as 'Exotica', 'Felicia's Journey', 'Sweet Hereafter', 'Ararat'. He has made installations at the Venice Biennale and at Burlington House in London. He's directed opera, Gavin Bryars's 'Doctor Ox's Experiment' at English National Opera and he is about to direct the first Canadian 'Ring'. And he's only forty four. Born in Cairo of Armenian parents and living in Canada, Egoyan's trademark features include a search for memory, truth, understanding, often seen through, or mediated by video, television, and driven by the relentless twistings of the curiosity of the mind. His films aren't obscure, but neither are they easy. That's how he makes them, that's he likes them. ____________________________________________________ Let's begin though with your origins. You're a migrant, immigrant in a country of immigrants. How important is that to you as an artist and a person. I think it was very important in my formation. My parents made the curious decision when they came to Canada to move to the west coast, Victoria , which was at the time a very isolated community. We were the only Armenian family there, as I was being raised and it meant that I became very aware at an early age of the notion of identity as being something of a construction. English is not my mother tongue and I remember very clearly not being able to communicate. Going to school and having to, and wanting nothing more than to be like everyone else. That was a very important part of my upbringing, this idea of shedding an identity and embracing another one. My parents were not necessarily, they didn't want to keep Armenian in the house or they didn't feel that it was important for me to hold onto something which they themselves had rejected obviously. If they, if it was important they would have moved to Toronto or Montreal where all of our other relatives settled when we came to Canada . They wanted to give you the chance to be Canadian, but the idea of alienation clearly hung around in the background. It was important to me because I was aware of what I, and I, this idea of letting go of something, to become something else, I had a very strong relationship to my grandmother, who didn't speak a word of English and whilst she was living with us in Victoria, that was my only connection to this other culture. And when she left, when I was about seven, that was quite traumatic for me and I felt that it was, there was a gap, there was something that even though, by the time I was eighteen, I could say I was completely assimilated, when I moved to Toronto and I became aware of a community, I tried to catch up, I relearnt the language as well as I could and I became very immersed in notions of what that identify meant. And of course this comes out in your most recent film 'Ararat', which we'll come onto later. But just to go back a bit. I'm struck, the number of times in well at least three films, 'Ararat', 'Felicia's Journey', 'Exotica', the point of entry into a culture, the actual customs and immigration, these are key moments and they're key scenes in your films. So there is something about the actual physical entry into a country and a culture that matters to you. Oh absolutely. I think that there are a number of rules and customs that you are expected to embrace. There is this point at which you are expected to declare what you have. Now, in a customs inspection that's quite literal. But this idea of the baggage that we arrive at in any situation, any given circumstance and the right that we give to someone else to inspect that, to make an assessment and notions of honesty and exchange and what we expect back. There's a point at which you can break down the constituent elements of what constitutes an identity, er but that's rather cold and quite clinical, but as we all know the things that make one attach oneself to someone else, or to a country or to a place are mysterious and can't be defined. But that is something which happens, or that is a process which takes place at the point of customs. It's as if they're saying, well you look Armenian, but can you convince us that you are really Canadian. Well it's interesting because let's say the customs inspection in 'Ararat' is based on a very strange experience I had a number of years ago. I'd shot a very low budget film in Armenia called 'Calendar' and I was returning into the country with cans of unexposed film and I was stopped. And the customs officer wanted to know for taxation purposes what the value of the film was. So I said well the material value is a few hundred dollars of the raw footage, and he said no, what will be the value of the finished film? And I said well that's a very curious question, I mean if the film is successful it might be worth millions of dollars and if no-one sees it it's valueless. And at that point he asked well what's the story about in your film, as though he could make at that point an assessment as to what its commercial value might be, based on my ability to tell the story. And about half was through he sort of stopped and realised that it was far too convoluted to be a commercial success and he just sort of waved me on. But I thought that that was quite an interesting situation where as one is often expected to do at a customs inspection you are there to answer questions as honestly as possible, and yet perform the role of being honest in such a way that someone else will assess your sincerity. And I think that that's very interesting. I'm fascinated by the inherent mystery of any meeting between two people and what are the points of entry that we allow. There is a great degree of formality and there are rules and there are clichés that allow conversation to continue. But how vulnerable we allow ourselves to be, and what we reveal of ourselves is I think the stuff of any drama. I'm going to park that there, because I want to come back to 'Ararat' and indeed that scene a little bit later. I just want to take up one previous thing. Your parents were both artists, what sort of artistic background at home did they bring you up in. Was there one particular kind of art that was particularly dominant? They were painters. They had met at art school in Egypt . My father had his first one man show in Cairo when he was sixteen and it was a huge success and on the basis of that he received a full scholarship to study at the Chicago Art Institute. He was the first person from the middle east to receive that type of scholarship and he went and at that time, abstract expressionism was very important in American art culture and he came back with this excitement but a body of work that no-one could understand. He had his second one man show at the age of 20 and while his first show had been very successful his second show in Cairo was a complete disaster and I think that that really changed him. When they moved to Canada he understood that to raise a family he really probably couldn't continue just painting, so he had a gallery and then that transmogrified into some sort of a furniture design store. And I was aware that my parents had made compromises and that they needed to not do what they loved doing most, in order to raise us, but that they were happiest when they were painting, and the feeling of creativity in the studio was something that I think had a strong impact on both my sister and I. My sister is a musician and we understood that when people were making things they were in touch with something else. Has that had an effect on you, that is that there's undoubtedly a strong strain of refusal to compromise in your work, and do you think that is explicitly connected with what you saw, of what your father in particular did. Yes, I think so, I think that I've tried to fight for structures that allowed me to not have to compromise. My film making practice started off quite marginally because I think in that industry, the higher the budget the more responsible you are to an audience, and I really tested those grounds very, very delicately as to how much of an audience there is for the type of film I'm doing. I mean it's been very gratifying because the audiences have grown, but I've never wanted to put myself into a situation where someone else was in control, and I think that that's difficult to do. Mind you, we are now in a time when the technology allows us to make films for miniscule budgets that are completely uncompromised. I think that digital, the digital revolution has been really liberating for a lot of film makers. And to distribute them much more freely, and not just have to go through the gateway of tyrannical distributors who only want a certain kind of movie. That's so true and so we are now at a juncture, and I think that, when I look at the budgets of my first features, which are miniscule, those would now be considered quite healthy. And that's really just as a result of this huge technological change. Now, I'm going to start, not with your very first movie, but 1987, a film called 'Family Viewing'. That was the one which is particularly famous in film history because Wim Wenders gave you his prize money, because he thought it was such a marvellous film. And it's about an alienated son, at odds with an apparently convention but dominating family. The father uses video both to record and to destroy the family story, and then when they all end up with the psychotherapist, he uses multicamera video to try to help the family interact, to heal their problems. Now, how did video, as an adjunct to living and its interrelationship with living come up in your mind. Because this is such a constant theme. What's very powerful about the video medium to me and the texture of video is that it is spontaneous. That, unlike film, which involves a degree of consideration, and actually involves a number of people to execute, video is something that can be generated at a very personal level. And it therefore allows us to archive our experience and perhaps even to surrender notions of memory to a piece of technology. That is both very liberating and also quite frightening because when you surrender your experience to a piece of technology while that means that it is fixed, it also means that it can come back to haunt you in unexpected ways and that if someone else gains access and control to that stored technology, that could be something which can be used to victimise and even to torture one. So my relationship to video was something that excited me because I'm fascinated by characters who have to make decisions which approximate decisions that I have to make myself. About life or about art? About life and art and about direction and choreography. I think that one of the imperatives of any act of direction is that you are doing something quite neurotic by definition, you are asking people to do things that they wouldn't be doing otherwise. You're organising people's behaviour and you're putting them into situations that are by definition artificial. So that when that happens within a family, when Dad is choreographing a home video or a home movie, those are very interesting pieces of family archaeology, like as to how those decisions are made. It's intrusive. It is intrusive and yet it is a medium which can be used to allow one a degree of objectification, that you can objectify your own behaviour, the behaviour of others that are close to you with a degree of distance. And certainly in that therapy which is based on a, at the time it was a very popular form of therapy where families would be video taped and that therapists would try and activate certain responses, which the participants would then go and look at later on and try to better understand themselves. What happens in Family Viewing though is that I take that and integrate the texture of video into the very format of the film. So there are let's say scenes with the boys, the protagonists current family, are shot very much like a soap opera. They're shot on video tape, using live cutting techniques, live switching. So that texture fascinated me because there's something very ephemeral about it, there's this sense that there's something unstable about the look of video, and I wanted to use that dramatically as a texture. And I thought metaphorically, since the film is about different generations within a family, it was interesting to use different generations of the film stock itself. And to weave those and to use the texture in quite a formalist way to allow a degree of access and entry. Before that, your very early movies, 'Calendar', 'Adjuster' and so on, you are, the personification so to say of the indi film maker, but you must have known that you didn't just want to be an indi film maker, you wanted to keep your independence, but you didn't want to be in that very, very small nature of people who are viewed and appreciated by only movie buffs. So kind of what was there in your mind as to where you thought you wanted to go and where you wanted to end up. Well I, one of the things I'm really grateful for is that when I began film making the whole notion of an independent film scene was nonexistent. There wasn't really any glamour attached to it. Certainly in the eighties and early nineties there was no idea that in my mind, that this was an entrée into another world. That only really happened with 'Exotica', which was again made for a tiny budget, there wasn't really an audience in mind as I was making it, but for the first time, and this was my sixth feature, I found that a film could cross over into that other world. But I look back at those early features and they were very much the product of an Arts Council system here. They were made for a very select audience and were not really intended for commercial distribution. So it wasn't that you'd put yourself in that particular world you wanted to get into so to say, the real movie world and 'Exotica' was distributed by Miramax wasn't it? Yes. It ended up being distributed by Miramax, and that's an interesting story in itself, because I remember when they showed me the, their marketing plan and the trailer and the poster and I was aghast. I thought well, this has got nothing to do with the film. It had strippers, nudes, everything like that, and a pretty lurid description. I have to say when I picked the DVD up and I read it, I said oh well, all right, if that's the sort of film it's going to be, and it's not. And now, but now it seems a little naïve, you know to think that I'd made a film, a murder mystery set in a strip club, and I wasn't really thinking of how it might be marketed. It just seems really unbelievable that I tried to actually block the marketing of the film, because I felt that it's misrepresenting what I'd done. But that was a fascinating experience for me. It was wonderfully idealistic, wasn't it? And naïve. And also it's interesting, is that I'll never forget a conversation I had with the head of marketing at Miramax at the time and he said look, it's very simple, yes we are not representing the spirit of the film, but that's not what marketing is about. Marketing is about trying to get as many people to see something as possible. Now if you are disappointing half the people that you are bringing into the theatre, there's also the chance that you are allowing people that would never have gone to see that film otherwise, to be exposed to something that might have an effect on them. I'd like you to say some more about 'Exotica', and I'm going to try and I'm aware that it's very difficult, to say five or six things about it which do very modest justice to its complexity, this is what I'll say - a middle aged man whose daughter was murdered, seeks comfort in a particular stripper in a night club. She seems to remind him of his daughter's babysitter. There's a voyeuristic nightclub master of ceremonies, a gay smuggler of protected species. It looks like a sex revenge thriller and its ends as a film about some understanding and reconciliation. The way it is made is there's this intense business of observing people. Everybody's watching people, the nightclub master of ceremonies is observing the people at the club and giving a running commentary on their behaviour. What is this appeal in observation and voyeurism. Or rather in being and observing voyeurism? The whole film I suppose, 'Exotica', it seems to be a lurid and quite exploitative piece of drama. Until such time as you understand what the motivations and reasons for those people being there actually is. Even though it's set out at the very beginning with the customs inspection where the customs officer is teaching a novice that you must always try and look beyond what is there, to try and determine what the story is really about. But I think that the viewers put into that situation, the moment you're in that club and it's such a, it is a very exciting place to be visually, I mean, so many people after seeing the film have said well why, people came to Toronto looking for that club and as we all know, I mean for the most part strip clubs are depressing and really quite unpleasant places, so the idea of a club which is full of that type of visual tantalisation and colour is irresistible. Yeah, but you weren't shooting it as something which was supposed to be resistible, I mean? It's supposed to draw you in. But for reasons other than what you think. And that notion of seduction is very important in all the films. That you set up a visual and an atmosphere through the alchemy of visual and music elements that draws the viewer in, and what they're actually having to encounter maybe something that would repel them otherwise. That they wouldn't want to have any part of, but at that point it's too late, and you have to really, your curiosity and your sense of exploration is peaked. I love that place, I mean that that's the most exciting place for anyone to be in when they're encountering a work of art, that they have to at once be very self conscious of their presence and their placement, but also drawn inexorably towards finding out what the logic and the circumstance is that places them there. Are you reminding us also, that we the audience are watching, you make the audience self-aware of what it's doing. And at least initially, to put a distance between us and events. Because by the end of all the films of yours that I've seen, there is no distance between me, at any rate the viewer, and events, you are drawn in. But initially, are you creating a distance? I am but I'm only doing that in a way that I think, I've always been very envious of novelists because it seems to me that so many novels that I admire present the story to the reader as something which is a story. And you're very aware of the artefact of the book, and your role as a reader. I think that film, at the very beginning, there's always been a split between the ability of film to allow the viewer to get lost in a reality, and the practice which ascertains that there is an act of witnessing. That there is a voyeuristic element, so the films that I'm drawn to, let's say a film like 'Vertigo', I mean you are so aware of your position as a viewer. And that creates a particular tension which I find really thrilling. Let's just stick for a moment to the voyeurism and the use of video in 'Felicia's Journey', where a young Irish girl who's pregnant by her lover, comes to England , to Birmingham , to try to find him, she doesn't know where he is. She falls in with a middle aged obsessive loner, who has a record of exploiting other lost young women, and I won't give that bit of the plot away, he recalls his experiences with other young women, as if they've been recorded. Now he may have a video recorder in his Morris Minor, or it's just that his memory sees his previous experiences in terms of a video recording, and then he lives most of his life through the television video recordings of his mother as a famous TV cook. I mean this is the most sort of thorough going exploitation or exposure of a character through video. Well I, it was an interesting dilemma I had because when I read the William Trevor novel which is an extraordinary book, the key scene in that book was to do with a moment that I, that would have been very reductive if I'd filmed it. That Trevor was able to use his prose to make this moment which made the relationship between the mother and the son quite explicit. He was able to shroud it in a language which wasn't pointed and was elusive. When you film something though you don't have that privilege very often. So I had to completely refigure what that relationship was about and I became very interested in this figure of really a minor celebrity, in English culture, Fanny Craddock. Now Fanny Craddock in some ways was the portal through which English cuisine was suddenly transformed. Now she's a forgotten figure. Not by some. Not by some. But I watched those old shows and I thought this, it would have been very interesting to have been the child of someone like that. Because Craddock herself was a force of nature and she had a personality which was larger than life, but this idea that, and of course this is just a, I was imagining this, but this idea of a child who had no contact to her mother, to his mother, except through the television shows that she made, and at that time she was far too busy to pay him any attention, but now, twenty years after the fact, after those shows are long forgotten, the boy finally gets to have this contact in relationship with the mother that he never had at that time. But then he's humiliated by being forced by his mother on screen to stuff in the most overtly sexual way a turkey in a way which for him is the equivalent of having sex with his mother on screen. Well that's very interesting you should say that. Which is both funny and revolting. Right. But in the book that scene is actually quite literal, where he does have sexual relations with his mother, but I found that that would just be unwatchable and in a way it was very reductive, it wouldn't have been that interesting, but to find another way of formatting that. But also to use the medium, to use the video texture, as you said, to raise issues of whether or not this is a literal event, or whether or not it's how someone reformats or re-imagines what might have happened. And this is one of the liberating aspects of the video texture for me is that it is an alternate way of recording personal history. In as much as the idea of having any scene in one's background replayed is both something which can be done literally, or as a mental process. But the thing about video is the replay is always the same. You're imprisoned in that version of events. The thing about memory, and I take it that what you're playing with the whole time is memory recalled through the mind or memory recalled through mechanical means, the thing about memory is that it at least offers you a chance of learning something from it. I mean is this, am I imposing this on you or is this therein how you approach video and its relationship to memory? Well to an extent, because that's what's fascinating about what the boy is doing in 'Family Viewing', where he's found this cache of old family videos and his father, who is in the process of now living a new life, having left the boy's mother is taking these videos and taping over them with homemade pornography that he's making with his mistress, and since, it's as though it's the only way that he can actually sustain a level of sexual excitement is in knowing that his exploits are being recorded and used to erase this previous life that he had. It makes it more important because they're recorded, it's on video. Exactly, and I do think that we have, we do perform in a way when we know that something is being recorded. I mean in, this conversation that we're having, I am much more careful in the choice of words, and in the way that I'm expressing myself, than I would be if it wasn't being recorded. When you take that dynamic and you put it within a family, it's bound to create these strange perversions which are bound to then be misused or appropriated and exaggerated by people who have other agendas. In 'Felicia's Journey' and elsewhere your characters live, or they are shown to live in the films in a continuum of narrative life, but also with all sorts of elements from their past intruding into the narrative continuum, and this business of layering, layering experience, memory, recollection is this the most important thing that you bring to films, is this what you are, the most important bit of what you're trying to do. One of the most profound experiences of my background is as an Armenian, having this piece of history that you know at one level has happened, but which you don't have the visual evidence to exploit. We are living in a century when we demand images, when we demand to be shown the scene that will make something clear and will serve as evidence. When a genocide has occurred and it's been denied, and where there's not a visual reference, there's not an iconographic moment that the public can seize on as being representative of what that experience is, it's extraordinarily vulnerable. You are relying then on the witnesses and the stories and we understand that there's a degree of subjectivity. And that to me is the most uncomfortable aspect of where my upbringing had to redefine and format itself. And I suppose that, in, you look at the latest film 'Ararat', and you understand that there is I suppose a whole community of people that might have expected that that film was going to be a very literal rendering, a historical document that would prove once and for all that this happened. And yet that's not my experience of it. My experience of this genocide is that history rather is formed by the way that competing versions of an event try and struggle to determine their authority. But the Armenians are still convinced that they are losing out in this struggle and that the Turkish denial as they would see it is stronger than the Armenian assertion of massacre. That is a profound and very sad situation for any people to be in. And as a dramatist working from that community, I think that this notion of denial is laced through all of the films at some level. 'Ararat' in a way is again about how vulnerable that history might be, and how dependent we are on someone to listen to it and appraise it and to give it a sense of value. Which can be erased. Because it can be so easily erased. Yep, but you weren't making an overtly political film in that sense? Absolutely not, but what's fascinating now is how the document, the very fact that there is a film called 'Ararat' has now become this political tool. Let's go back to that scene which you described earlier on which was your experience of going through customs and having to explain to an immigration officer what you were doing, and there's a scene in 'Ararat' where the young man comes back, having filmed Van secretly, having filmed Ararat and the immigration officer wants to know what's going on. And at the end the climax is, what's in those cans of film, is it film, or is it, because by then everybody thinks, heroin? And it turns out the young man is let go and then you see the immigration officer with the can open and its filled with heroin. And somebody says why did you do it? And he said well I think, I couldn't believe that he thought that that was what he was doing. But I wonder whether it's a metaphor for saying that importing these memories, into a country like Canada, if it's too virulent, is as dangerous as heroin. Well, I think it's the most provocative point that the Christopher Plummer character makes. Earlier in the inspection when he confronts the boy by saying, what are you bringing into this country. And he's not really talking about at that point, what's in the can, but the whole notion of the experience and this legacy of hatred and violence and can this country, can any country be the repository of those grievances. Yes, if every single community brings with them as part of their identity, their historic grievances. Right, and this is the paradox of the multicultural system, I suppose, that we want people to keep the more folkloric aspects of their culture, we want the dancing and we want the food. We want those things that we can immediately share and have access to, but we don't want those unresolved and dangerous and often quite explosive elements which are also part of the culture. But it's true, you would break up the home culture, the new culture if everybody was continuing to fight the battles which they brought with them. Absolutely. So how do you resolve that? Well. I mean I think it's an ongoing issue, I think that you resolve that and this is my belief, is that you resolve that by, by conversations between individuals, by the way you negotiate with strangers, by the way you negotiate, and 'Ararat' certainly is full of those, and says well history is not really being defined by these grand gestures, the film premieres, or the large broad strokes, but rather in the way that individuals address these issues, in hallways or in customs offices, or in places where we can be infused at all times with the humanity of how these events change individuals. We need to say something about just how you work, and your films have these complex structures. How far do you know before you start shooting, what the structures are going to be? Are they scripted in such a detailed way? What is scripted is the idea that there are, there is a mosaic. Now, the editing of the film is another version of the script in a way. Because you then, as you are, the alchemy that you've generated through performance and camera placement and music will alter the shape, I mean in ways that you can't anticipate at a script stage. But what you are, what the blueprint of the script allows everyone to understand is that it is a fluid process, that there is a dramatic coherence but also to underline that this is only one part of the evolution of the film. But the things have to fit pretty tightly, although there are certain scenes where either you leave them deliberately vague, or they do steal up on you such as an incestuous relationship in 'Sweet Hereafter', which.... That's a very good example. When you were to read that moment, I mean I think that the incest is quite evident and clear, but the way it's filmed, and the way it's cast throws some confusion onto that, and that ambiguity is something that then has to be addressed in the editing. Ah, so your sense of the timing as to when to bring the incest theme back, that was something which you only felt in the cutting room. Absolutely, and if you were to read the shooting script of 'Sweet Hereafter', the voiceover that Nicole, the incest victim has was very different than what we see in the final film. What you need to read is very different, often from what you need to see. But the question of the composition of scenes, I think the crucial shot in my mind here is in 'Sweet Hereafter' when a school bus goes off the road, it's filled with children, it careers off onto a frozen lake, breaks through the ice, and then sinks. And you see that from four hundred yards away, from the point of view of the person who witnessed it. There's not a single shot of, screaming faces .. Well of course, because the whole idea there is to show the sense of helplessness that the father watching this, he can only imagine what's happening in that bus at that moment. To suddenly put the camera there I think would dispel and trivialise what that character's experience is, and that's what I think the great challenge is in directing a film, is to find a way of visually representing these moments which address what, and how the characters themselves experience those situations. For instance in many of the films the emotions are buried and perhaps there is a sense of coldness even, but the music and the lushness of the visual image works against that, so that we as a viewer are aware that there is an emotional life beyond what we are seeing. That in a film like 'Exotica', where there's something figurative about the aspects of dialogue and the way that the characters presents themselves, that there is something, these are shattered people, these are people who are just living in shells. But the music would suggest that there is something else welling underneath, waiting to erupt in a way. And what often wells up of course is violence. And the threat of violence, and quite often it is only the threat of violence, but it's very frightening and it just erupts like a firecracker, as I guess it does in real life. I think so. I think so, and I think that those moments are unexpected and they are catastrophic often. They're catastrophic because we have so little control over them. And does that imminence of violence actually frighten you as a person? What I'm most frightened of is this notion of how we react and would protect ourselves from that. And knowing of course that there is no protection, that we, at any moment our stability and sense of control of our lives can become, taken away from us. And that helplessness, that helplessness that Billy Ansel feels as he sees that bus disappearing. Or let's say the helplessness of an entire culture as they see their communities eradicated as certainly happened, or is depicted in 'Ararat', how we can prepare ourselves for that. This is what, why the character of 'The Adjuster' was so fascinating. This is an earlier film. This is an earlier film. Which is based on the notion of an insurance adjuster whose, who has this obsessive attention to his clients, who's trying to rematerialise the life that they have lost, while his own life is completely shattered. And there are professions and occupations which allow someone to deal with neuroses and fear that would otherwise not be socially acceptable, but that the parameters of the job be it an insurance adjustor or litigation lawyer or a customs officer, that these are jobs that allow you access into other people's lives in a way that would otherwise be outrageous. And allow you to deal with issues that are unresolved in your own personality by potentially exploiting other people's pain and sense of vulnerability. I want to end with an installation that you did in London at Burlington House. It was called 'Steenbeckett', Beckett being your television version of 'Krapp's Last Tape', the steambeck being homage to a machine we all love, which is the machine on which countless films have been made where you can synchronise the film and the sound and view them and make them, but of course, they no longer exist, they've been junked. There is Krapp, looking at all his accumulated tapes, and at the age of almost 70 deciding that that's the end, there's nothing else. Were you also in that installation looking back at what you've done, looking at your accumulated, huge accumulation already of film and digital and thinking, what is your equivalent of the monologue, looking back as it were? Well, my equivalent is this idea that I am an artist who is working at a particular juncture where the material aspect and the weight of these archival mediums is evaporating, and with it perhaps a sense that there is a rare aspect to the accumulation, the very physical weight of experience. This is what the installation was trying to address actually, that the last shot of that TV version was a twenty minute take of John Hurt. And I was aware as we were shooting this on 35mm film of the cumbersome nature of the technology that we needed to record this moment. And how in a few years that would be obsolete, as a steambeck is, the machinery... Isn't that an improvement, isn't that an advance, some would say. It's an advance, but I would also suggest that there was this moment where the very physical vulnerability of the medium reflected a corporeal aspect of our own experience which made the decision to record, and how we recorded, and how we preserved, a more considered choice. That we were aware that how we were transcribing our experience was not as spontaneous, that now we are in a time where with the digital process, that we are able to record everything.. And it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It appears not to matter. It appears not to matter. And I think what's so touching about 'Krapp's Last Tape' is that, that very physical process reflects a relationship to his own past which we can identify as being human. Yes, you said somewhere that it's important that we remember that time, ie the memory, occupies space. And that, I suppose, if digital appears to exist out of time, then does that also mean that it is less valued because it doesn't occupy space and therefore we understand it less well? Well that's very interesting because of course we get into that whole Kantian sort of dilemma between the phenomenal and the nominal. And what, that we have a sense that our lives and what we experience is really tailored by the instruments and the perceiving mechanisms we have to take that in, but there is a whole other world outside of that which has, is governed by laws that we can't even begin to imagine. And yet we live under the illusion that the world we see is the world that exists, and that perhaps the old technology was able to correspond to aspects of our own physical selves, in a way that made that definition easier to understand. That we are now in a time where we don't have any comprehension of how these materials work and so we surrender aspects that are really profound decisions that we have to make and we assign them without considering what that might mean later on. What the implications of that might be and we divest ourselves of a degree of responsibility. Atom Egoyan, thank you very much. |
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Listen to the interview with Atom Egoyan
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