Seite 191 [191]
ATOM EGOYAN’s CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE CINEMATIC LANDSCAPE OF CANADA
Following his first experimental works, Atom Egoyan made his feature film
debut in 1984 with Next of Kin. Over time, his filmography expanded, reflect¬
ing a constant increase in budgets and the director’s growing popularity with
audiences. Egoyan’s fourth film, The Adjuster (1991), brought him considerable
recognition in the United States and was the first of many to be distributed by
Alliance Communications, later known as Alliance Atlantis Communications,
co-founded by Robert Lantos. His 1997 film The Sweet Hereafter won several
awards and international acclaim. His later films, released after 2000, include
Ararat (2002), Where the Truth Lies (2005), Adoration (2008), Chloe (2010)
and Devil’s Knot (2013). Best known for his arthouse style, Egoyan has made
films about a wide range of themes, including traumatic loss, grief, obsession,
manipulation, fantasy and sexuality, but also about identity and the search for
truth, national and family history, the memory of the past, and the interplay
between sexuality, technology and alienation, creating a complex and rich
visual world.
The following analysis focuses on Atom Egoyan’s depiction of trauma and
identity, two key aspects of the director’s cinematic world, and examines how
they take on new forms in his recent films. The three feature films examined
below, The Captive (2014), Remember (2015) and Guest of Honour (2019), were
all made in the last decade. In one of these movies, one witnesses the lasting
impact of a major historical event, whereas in the other two, small and local
narratives take centre stage. The Captive presents the consequences of the
actions of a psychologically deformed and sick person through the individual
trauma and shock of ordinary people while also giving us a glimpse into the
unfathomable mechanisms of evil. In Remember, Egoyan engages in a post-Ho¬
locaust theme but in a way that reimagines it outside of the familiar narrative
while confronting the viewer with the protagonist’s search for revenge and,
ultimately, his identity crisis. Guest of Honour, by contrast, reveals the trau¬
matic consequences of some bad choices made by ordinary people.
THE CAPTIVE — A FAMILY DRAMA IN THE FACE OF EVIL
What happens when someone loses a child? Or if someone finds themselves
in a situation where that seems the most likely possibility? This trauma is one
of the most dramatic of human situations and a recurring motif in world lit¬
erature from ancient mythologies and the Bible to the present day. As Golden
(152) writes, referring to Jasper Griffin’s observation, “[t]he death of children
is a constant theme in the Iliad, so much so that Jasper Griffin can write that
the ‘pathetic motifs: “short life” and “bereaved parents” dominate the archi¬
tecture of the whole poem”. The Captive is not the first film in Egoyan’s oeuvre
to explore this theme, with The Sweet Hereafter (1997) showing how a tragic
+ 189 *