In the Director’s Statement for Speaking Parts (1989), his third feature, and his first to be invited to the Cannes Film Festival, Atom Egoyan noted: “I have worked in a hotel for five years. I have worked in film for ten. Both of these professions involve the creation of an illusion. In one, the territory of illusion is a room. In the other, it is a screen… Speaking Parts explores a terrain which moves between rooms and screens; a terrain of memory and desire.” This considered self-assessment also applies to the Toronto-based filmmaker’s earlier features, Next of Kin (1984) and Family Viewing (1987), both enigmatic films about the production and consumption of images. Memory and desire are for Egoyan “emotional states intrinsically linked with notions of projection, which has a psychological significance as a term and as a process, and also a cinematic one. So there is a crossover for me working as an artist in both terrains.”
Egoyan’s latest effort locates itself in much the same illusory territory—indeed, one of its working titles was “Location” “because of the double sense of its being a site and also a process.”
So begins our Fall 1991 cover story. To keep reading, view a PDF of the entire article.
