[Reader-list] Egoyan's film on Armenian 1915 genocide

[Rana Dasgupta]

Journey into genocide
By Richard Wolfson
FT.com site; Mar 21, 2003


Richard Wolfson talks to one of the world's leading directors and finds that
while he has a casual approach, he's not afraid to tackle the serious
issues.


It is easy to imagine why there might be a terrible and widespread
misunderstanding about the films of Atom Egoyan. The director's name, exotic
and portentous, seems to suggest those three-hour epics whose origin might
lie somewhere to the east of Europe, probably extremely worthy, definitely
subtitled, perhaps with long pauses and certainly of little entertainment
value.

That would be a sad error indeed. The films are some of the most racy,
spooky, compelling, perverse and even downright weird inventions you will
ever encounter. They also happen to originate in English-speaking Canada.
Egoyan's name might derive from his Armenian parents, who moved to Victoria
in western Canada from Egypt when Atom was a small child, but he is a
native-born English-speaking Canadian, if one who has remained fascinated by
his Armenian roots.

A second mistake, having seen the films, is to expect the director to be one
of those grand old men of the cinema, pushing 70, full of guttural wisdom.
He turns out to be a frighteningly boyish just 40-something who made his
first films in his early 20s.

Those early films are quite something. Made on next to no budget, with
minimal support from the Canadian Arts Council, they tackle complex
questions of identity, messed up family relationships and ritualised
mechanisms of denial, all themes that have remained central to Egoyan's
films. In Next of Kin from 1984, a disenchanted young man passes himself off
as the long lost son of an Armenian family, who years before had given up
their son for adoption. In Family Viewing, which appeared in 1987, another
disaffected youth becomes attached to his grandmother, who has been placed
in a home; he fakes her death, swapping her with the body of the woman who
has died in the next bed, so he is able to abduct her into his care.

In later films the budget grew and the scenarios became stranger, with the
biscuit being taken by the cataclysmically odd The Adjuster, about an
insurance investigator who beds his clients while pretending to sort out
their claims. Best known though, and no less weird, is Exotica. Set in a
kinky Toronto nightclub, the male protagonist is locked into a bizarre
relationship with an exotic dancer who dresses as a schoolgirl as he tries
to come to terms with the murder of his daughter. All the films are shot
with hallucinatory conviction, with plots that employ the clockwork
precision of an Almodóvar and the spooked out mysteriousness of a David
Lynch.

None of this would quite prepare one, though, for Egoyan's latest film, the
epic and controversial Ararat. When I met him in his office in Toronto,
Egoyan was still recoiling from some of the flak. "I've had threats, and
thousands of emails were sent to Miramax in an attempt to prevent the
distribution of the film. There was a point at which it looked as though it
could be denounced as a piece of hate literature, which is serious in
Canada." The trouble derives from the Turkish community, who are not at all
happy that the film deals with the Turkish massacre of its Armenian minority
in 1915. The genocide is well documented, but denied to this day by the
Turkish government. "I have often met Turkish individuals who haven't heard
about it," says Egoyan. "It does raise the thorny issue - can someone be
accused of denial about something they don't know about? Also it's a bit sad
because you are talking about millions of people in Turkey who don't have
access to their own history." Ararat is no simple propaganda film, however.
Its labyrinthine plot has all the elements one associates with an Egoyan
film - a sexual relationship between a stepdaughter and stepson, which while
not exactly incestuous (they have no blood relations in common) is slightly
disturbing; countless difficult relationships between fathers and sons,
daughters and mothers; and characters all on the edge of a nervous
breakdown. The plot centres around the making of a film within a film, which
stages historical scenes from the siege of Van, when Armenian volunteers
defended the town against impossible odds.

It is a strange process watching this film. Often one is sucked into the
historical sections and then yanked back out into its "real life", as when
the Turkish actor playing the role of a fascistic Turkish officer steps out
of his role to ask whether this really happened. Is this a classic Brechtian
distancing device, showing the audience how the film is constructed and
leaving them to make up their own mind? "That's absolutely right!" says
Egoyan with evident relief. "I wanted to create a situation where you are
completely torn between your emotional surrendering to these scenes of
atrocity and your sense of suspicion as to why you don't know about it. Part
of the film is about the mechanics of denial, in the face of overwhelming
evidence."

You get the feeling that Egoyan can't see what all the fuss is about. "When
I speak to Armenians they say it was very brave of me to make this film, but
I don't see it that way. It's just an extension of the work I've been doing.
The issues that are in the film - about denial and how we negotiate our way
through this image laden society, and how we try and find origins and roots
of emotion - that's been in my work for a long time, so this just seemed a
natural step. But I think a lot of Armenians are astonished that the film
has been made, because it's true that up till now this has not been dealt
with cinematically." Perhaps this is what attracted eminent Armenians into
the cast, such as Charles Aznavour who plays the imaginary film's director,
and Eric Bogosian in the role of his assistant. All the cast is fabulous,
including Egoyan's long term collaborator and wife, Arsinée Khanjian,
Christopher Plummer and newcomer David Aplay. Aplay is sensational as the
naive and troubled young man who travels to Armenia to collect footage for
the film and returns to Toronto with something suspicious in his sealed film
canisters.

It may be evident from the many layers of Ararat that Egoyan's films
sometimes seem to be bursting at the seams, as if they might jump out of the
frame and even spill out of the movie theatre. His work has already moved
into opera houses, where he's an in-demand director, and into galleries
where his installations have won critical acclaim. A recent installation,
Close, forces the audience into an 18-inch gap between a wall and a back
projected film screen. There is something vaguely pornographic on the
screen, but you are forced so close to the image you cannot make out what it
is. Another piece, this time in Montreal, involved thousands of fragments of
reel to reel tape found in attics and dustbins.

Does he feel trapped by the format of the conventional feature film? "There
is something very orthodox about the cinema screen which is very reassuring,
but also oppressive in a way. It's set there, and you see this white canvas
and you know that's where you are going to see the projection, and there's a
degree of anticipation and confirmation. And I've always felt if there was
some way to challenge that, to project images elsewhere, then that would be
much more satisfying."

Despite the unfortunate limitation of a single screen Egoyan's films do use
an installational approach to image and soundtrack, particularly through the
work of his long-term collaborator, the composer Mychael Danna. Danna's
music is a succulent oriental beast that sometimes snakes its way into the
most inappropriate scenes. The music from the club in Exotica finds its way
into other parts of that film, haunting melodies that challenge the
audience's sense of location. Egoyan likes creating this state of doubt,
even if he aims to resolve it eventually. "The kind of work that excites me
most is when I feel lost - when I feel that I may not be able to get it,
that I may be floating, but when I have to trust the artist. And there's
that sense of resolution at the end, that we have arrived at a point."

Another factor that sets Egoyan apart from other directors of his generation
is his history in avant-garde formalist film. When he first arrived in
Toronto in the early 1980s he joined a group called The Funnel and became a
long-term fan of avant-garde film makers such as Michael Snow and Stan
Brackhage. One friend even glues frames from super-8 film onto 16mm stock
for projection, another "film within a film" idea.

Egoyan says he finds it hard discussing these concerns with the press, who
are usually on the lookout for more salacious material. He's happy to be
part of this do-it-yourself Toronto film community, and claims that if the
big budgets ran out he'd return to no-budget avant-garde film making.
Walking around the theatre district in Toronto I noticed that Egoyan's
colleague, the director David Cronenberg, along with other Canadian
celebrities, has a star embedded in the concrete. As yet Egoyan does not
have one, but it's probably only a matter of time. He claims he's in no
hurry. "One of the things about living in Toronto is that we don't
mythologise our own, and that the stars on the sidewalk are vaguely
ridiculous because we are not a culture which creates star systems. There's
a casualness."

Perhaps this casualness has enabled Egoyan to stroll into the role of one of
the world's leading and most exciting directors. Since I talked with Egoyan
in Toronto things have moved on, particularly in relation to Ararat. A
courageous Turkish distributor is negotiating to bring the film to Turkey,
which for Egoyan would be nothing short of mir- aculous. Perhaps it brings
forward the day the Armenian diaspora looks forward to, when the Turkish
authorities and all the countries of the world are finally able to
acknowledge the history of the Armenian and Turkish peoples.

MIGHTY ATOM

Egoyan has participated in one of the most unusual prize swapping events in
film history. In 1987 German director Wim Winders won the prize at
Montreal's Festival of New Cinema, for his film 'Wings of Desire'. He
surprised everybody by handing over the prize to Atom Egoyan, whose 'Family
Veiwing' was also showing in the festival. In 1991 Egoyan repeated the
gesture. The Festival of Festivals awarded him the prize for his film 'The
Adjuster'. Egoyan promptly handed it over to an almost unknown Canadian
newcomer, John Pozer, for his first feature 'The Grocer's Wife'.