A few days ago Betsy and attended a special screening of Atom Egoyan's new movie Adoration. Egoyan is a Canadian film maker known for some remarkable films like Exotica (1994), The Sweet Hereafter (1997), and (my favorite of his so far) Ararat (2002). The screening was held at Innis College at the University of Toronto, where Egoyan is a Distinguished Visitor. He showed up after the screening to answer questions from the audience for about half an hour.
Like many of Egoyan's films, questions of identity as mediated by both history and the representation of history are front and centre. Egoyan is also very interested in how trauma is ritualized and socially processed.
This has obvious roots in Egoyan's biography--it was when he came to the U of T as an Undergrad that he began learning about his Armenian heritage and the legacy of the genocide. At the time Father Harold Nahabedian (also of Armenian heritage) was the Chaplain at Trinity College. Harold taught Egoyan the Armenian Alphabet and other cultural lessons, and Egoyan remembers that time fondly.
During the Q and A period I asked Egoyan about the relationship between his own experience of coming-of-age and the appearance of that theme in his work. He didn't really answer the question, but Betsy, my wife-the-art-historian, pointed out that artists rarely have good answers as to why they create certain things. It's part of the old "Fallacy of Authorial Intention" problem familiar to anyone who has studied critical theory. The better question is probably "how" they create. My sister Lynne used to interview a lot of artists, I bet she would back me up on that.
Here is the trailor for Adoration:
Good movie. Heavy on character study.
-t
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