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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, reflecting 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-Holocaust 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 traumatic 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 literature 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 architecture 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 *
