ATOM EGOYAN IN CONVERSATION WITH DAVID MARKUS
Saatchi Online Daily Magazine
June 28, 2007
This June witnessed the inaugural run of LuminaTO, a heavily funded new
arts festival that seeks to enshrine the city of Toronto as North
America’s newest cultural capital. The festival featured world premieres
in theatre, dance, music, and the visual arts. It was also the setting
for a new collaborative work between Canadian-Armenian filmmaker Atom
Egoyan, who sat on LuminaTO’s artistic committee, and Turkish artist
Kutlug Ataman.
‘Auroras/Testimony’ is really two separate video installations, divided
by partition, whose combined effect results from the overlapping
thematic orientation of the artists involved. Ataman’s work is a
single-channel documentary interview between the artist and his aging
former caretaker, a survivor of the Armenian genocide. Egoyan’s work
features the projected faces of seven actresses each giving their own,
carefully modulated performance of the little-known figure of Aurora
Mardiganian.
Aurora was an Armenian émigré whose story was fastened upon by movie
producer Harvey Gates and made into a film in 1919 of which only a few
grainy minutes survive today. As fascinating as Aurora?s heartrending
tale itself are the circumstances under which it was exploited by early
commercial cinema. Aurora was cast as herself in the production, and
afterward embarked on a nation-wide publicity tour that was delayed when
the survivor-turned-actress suffered an emotional breakdown.
Subsequently, seven alternate ‘Auroras’ were contracted to fill in for
the original.
It is this issue of ‘authenticity" that Egoyan’s work is most concerned
with. As a theme, the immeasurable accuracy of historical narrative has
emerged repeatedly in his work, most ostensibly in the critically
acclaimed, feature-length film Ararat (Miramax, 2002), which focuses on
events surrounding the 1915-1917 Turkish slaughter of up to a million
Armenians – an act officially recognized as genocide by most Western
nations, but denied, in that characterization, by the Turkish government.
The next stop for ‘Auroras/Testimony’ is the Istanbul Biennale, where it
is expected to create a stir for its graphic allusions to what has
remained a very controversial topic.
Egoyan’s films recently underwent a retrospective at Centre Pompidou in
Paris. He is currently working on a new film called Adoration. We spoke
the morning following LuminaTO’s closing events.
DAVID MARKUS: First of all, what was your involvement in LuminaTO, and
how successful do you think the festival was overall?
ATOM EGOYAN: I was asked to participate as an artistic advisor and in
its early stages that was a crucial role because we didn’t have
[Festival CEO] Janice Price or any of the other members of the team
involved at that time. So for this initial year I think something quite
miraculous occurred which was that in the space of a little over a year
this came together in a focused and unexpectedly successful way. Toronto
is going through a major cultural Renaissance, and I think this festival
defined that.
DM: Most people know you for your feature length films. How long have
you been making video art and is this something you will continue to do?
AE: I’ve been involved in making video art for about ten years now. This
is the first time I have ever presented a piece in Toronto. There was a
collaboration I did with the Portuguese artist Juliao Sarmento which was
presented at the Venice Biennale in 2000, and then there was a piece I
did with Artangel in London which was presented in 2002, and then
another large-scale presentation at the Montreal Musée d’Art
Contemporain, which was also presented in 2002. I have welcomed all of
these opportunities because there were a number of formal considerations
I was able to work into my earlier films which I?ve had to relinquish as
the work has become more ‘traditional’ I suppose – so these are real
opportunities to engage a viewer that I know is by nature more curious
and open than the traditional film goer.
DM: In your interview with [Art Gallery of Ontario Director] Bruce
Ferguson you talked about the differences between the gallery and the
movie theatre. From your perspective what are the advantages and
disadvantages of the gallery setting versus the cinema?
AE: Well the disadvantages have to do with access. Right now, for
example, I’m dealing with people who are coming back into town and who
would like to see the piece and can’t. There is no DVD I can send them.
There is no way that they can experience what that space was about. I’m
used to that coming
from theatre. I’m used to the ephemeral nature of a presentation, and
the fact that it will only now exist in the minds of the people who
happened to have witnessed it. But that’s a little frustrating, and one
does become used to this idea of the film that, yes, is best experienced
on the big screen, but can also be referenced, quite accurately, in a
number of different formats. With an installation, though there might be
an archival recording, and stills, and certainly there will be
descriptions of it – none of that will come close to the physical
experience of what is being negotiated in that space.
DM: You suggested that one way to increase the viewing experience, with
‘Auroras’ was to follow an individual face throughout the entirety of
the video.
AE: That was my particular take and a number of people followed that.
The thing that that raises is the notion of performance, but I had some
misgivings about having said that, because the interesting thing about a
piece like this is that there is no orthodoxy. The thing about listening
to an artist too carefully is that you tend to get overwhelmed by their
particular revelation of a given moment.
DM: I found it powerful to take it in all at once, almost as though I
was being attacked from all sides – as though I were being implicated in
the story that these women were relating.
AE: That may have been the stronger experience. When I first was editing
this, and I saw all seven faces on one band, there was something very
compelling about that as well. It’s quite possible that in some future
incarnation it is going to have a more unified presentation. But given
that space – Art Core – it seemed right to make full use of the entire
gallery. For future presentations I would like to be more involved in
responding to the space itself. I love projecting against the walls
themselves, not making it a monitored piece, but one that has to be
interpreted given the dimensions I’m working with. I don’t think it will
ever be bigger than what you saw here. In terms of scale this was the
most extreme version of the piece. We were really pushing the technology
in order to keep synchronization when the machines were that far apart.
DM: The text that accompanies the work talks about how Harvey Gates was
quick to recognize the commercial potential of Aurora’s story. You’ve
talked about Aurora as an early victim of celebrity, at the same time
you must be aware that you resemble Gates to a degree insofar as you’ve
said that the inspiration for the work began with the story of Aurora.
What I’m wondering is how does one tread the line between an honest
telling, or re-telling, and exploitation? Is your work more about
returning a sense of dignity to this person’s life, or is it about
revealing how any re-telling is problematized, as it were, by the rift
between language and event, between fact and fiction?
AE: I’m very suspicious of this notion of how you can dignify a
survivor’s story. What we see in Aurora are seven performers with
various degrees of passivity and engagement. What fascinates me is how
various people respond to different levels of engagement. Some people
may find one performance way
over the top, whereas others need that sort of emotional release. But in
every instance there is a fine line between what is entertaining and
what is formulaic – as opposed to what is ‘authentic’. We have a sense
sometimes that tales of extreme horror must be related with objective
detachment in order for us to listen and absorb, but that also has
limitations. You need only to look at the faces of some of the
performers who are completely emotionless to understand the frustrations
of that telling. And yet the
moment we introduce performance, it raises the very delicate question of
whether history can only be passed through the success of the
performance, and I think that was the question I tried to raise in my
film Ararat. Does history rely on a film version? What happens if that
film version is compromised? What if it’s not a good film? How do those
factors situate this piece of history?
DM: Is there a sense in which your work responds directly, or
indirectly, to Jewish holocaust history and the role that, for instance,
the Shoah Foundation, and testimony as a whole, has played in the
construction of historical narrative more generally as a result?
AE: I was just reading the statistics the other day. There are about 900
films that deal with the holocaust, and there are, I think, a total of
ten that deal with the Armenian genocide, most of which have never been
seen. Some of them are community efforts, which are really amateurish,
so I think that what’s happened with holocaust representation is that
just through the sheer number of pieces the very strong work has been
able to survive and emerge. The role of the victim – for instance Anne
Frank – in popular consciousness was, after the war, taken over by the
survivor – the Elie Wiesel – and that became the symbol for the
holocaust in peoples? minds. But with films like Schindler’s List it has now
transferred to Spielberg, or someone who is able to represent that, to
engage a popular discourse around it through a media event. And that
shift, though completely understandable, is complicated for me as an
Armenian dealing with a history that has not been told through a popular
film. What fascinated me about Aurora’s history is that there was a
popular film made immediately after the event, which was lost, and so
whatever status that may have had at the time has been completely
forgotten. So what does it then mean to reignite this history by putting
her back on the screen through these performers?
DM: A lot of your work has focused on reenactments of reenactments. Why
does film lend itself so well to this sort of self-reflexivity?
AE: Because it so convincingly allows us to believe that what we are
witnessing is real. From the moment the Lumière brothers recorded a
train approaching the film camera, people were horrified, they thought
what they were seeing had to be real. And I think that that almost
childish, atavistic sort of approach we have to cinema has never really
left us. We’re really not critical when we are watching a film image.
That is also what is compelling about raising these issues in a gallery
setting, because we are naturally more critical of a projected image in
a gallery space even though when we see Kutlug’s Nanny, we subscribe to
that documentary image an immediate authenticity to which my seven
Auroras allude through their performativity.
DM: Let me ask you, then, to put a viewer on the screen as someone
watching a film, as you did recently in the short you screened at
Cannes, is that something that distances us from the presumed
authenticity of the image? To what extent can film critique the
imagistic society of which it is apart?
AE: There are a number of filters you can present within a narrative
that remind the viewer of the artifact they are watching. That does
intrude on the traditional golden rule of cinema, which is that the
viewer should escape into that image, that there shouldn’t be a degree
of self-consciousness. But I don’t know that you can raise those issues
you’ve mentioned without creating a clear frame within which to watch
them. Now, I think the real challenge is to incite all the pleasure, and
the chaos, which we associate with commercial cinema, through those
devices. That’s what makes the new Charlie Kauffman films so exciting to
me. That you are aware of those devices.
DM: Even while they are being enacted upon you.
AE: Yes.
DM: How would you characterize the collaborative aspect of this project?
AE: The collaboration begins with my contact with Kutlug’s work over the
years, which I’ve found really exciting and inspiring. It is ironic that
my work is multi-screen and Kutlug’s is single-channel, because what I
associate with his work is that multi-screen experience where the viewer
has to negotiate with a number of different realities. I think that he
is an extraordinary artist, and when this came up it seemed like an
amazing opportunity to deal with this notion of testimony. The fact that
he was raised with a genocide survivor and was able to remember that
aspect of her history, and yet she is in this very curious place where,
though she retains that history, she can’t recall it, she can’t summon
it in detail. What I found really exciting was unexpected, and that was
the way the two pieces reacted sonically to each other. That you could
be in Kutlug’s room listening to his Nanny and hear the Auroras giving a
clear description of something which was lost to us. And then you could
be in my room, and over these performances you had the constant sound of
this ‘authentic’ testimony filling in that space. What we do in Istanbul
when it?s remounted, I’m not quite sure. Kutlug is thinking of not using
a wall, so that there is more visual contact. We’ll see how that works.
What’s really exciting about this piece is that it will respond to the
very specific, and provocative, placement of this history in a city
where it is
somehow taboo. In that sense, it will be very different from how it was
presented in Toronto, which is as it should be.
DM: Certain cultural theorists have suggested that the repression of
mourning in relation to violent or traumatic events in patriarchal
societies creates a sort of positive feedback pattern that fosters
further aggression. What is the power of a female voice, or even a
feminist voice, within the context of the traumatic event your work
deals with?
AE: It’s not just a female voice, it is who is actually controlling that
voice. In the case of the original Aurora, the producer was male and I
don’t think that Aurora herself had any control. That is one of the most
provocative aspects of her story. Her voice was never really hers to
extend, it was always something outside of her. She was looking for her
brother. Her need to get her voice out there was to make contact with a
missing sibling. It was then consumed and exploited by commercial
interests. One has to keep in mind that there was a tremendous Christian
movement afoot in America at that time. We?ve located the original
poster from the movie, and it’s fascinating. It’s this vision of a lily
white, young, virginal figure literally being pulled away by this dark,
monstrous, swarthy man. It’s a shocking image. There was this feeling
that this was almost a crusade. Before Jihad was summoned, it was
basically a Jihad against the Christian minorities of Turkey. The way
that that was played by American interests at that moment was really
quite shocking.
DM: Let me ask you an obvious question that goes along with what we are
talking about – what is the significance of your and Kutlug’s respective
national heritages to the work in question?
AE: In my case it’s even more complex because I’m an assimilated guy. I
work very much within the Canadian context. I was raised here, even
though I was born in Egypt, and I think that is reflected in my piece.
The fact that it’s a multi-cultural cast, and it’s really talking about
where stories of trauma are located within the community, country, and
city that I work in. Armenian identity is basically divided between
those who are raised in what is now independent Armenia and the diaspora
culture. The diaspora culture is very difficult to generalize. It’s
really based in the countries our grandparents settled in. I would
always consider that my background coming to this piece is Canadian even
before Armenian. Now Kutlug is in a very different place about that.
There is this issue, though, of consciousness. To what degree is he
aware of this history in terms of his upbringing, what he’s been
allowed, or what he’s been exposed to? And certainly that issue arises
in the diasporic experience as well. In the desire to assimilate and to
be absorbed into a new culture, how much of your past do you hold onto?
In my case that wasn?t a huge part of my upbringing, my parents were
proto-assimilationist as opposed to those who were raised within the
Armenian community. I was raised outside of it. And these issues came to
the forefront when I came to Toronto from the west coast.
DM: What does it mean for a major contemporary art museum like the
Centre Pompidou to be holding a retrospective of your work?
AE: Two events happened in this past month, there was the retrospective
and then there was Cannes, where I was showing my short film. One thing
it does is you begin to gain a sense of how your work fits in. At the
beginning of your career you want to produce as much work as possible so
you can define anidentity that will give you a sense of legitimacy and
certainly define and give you a career. At this point when you see that
body of work presented the question is what does it add up to, what does
it mean? There are certain concerns that have come up repeatedly. You
have to remember that the Pompidou is just showing films, they aren’t
showing these installations that I’ve done. What’s really become clear
to me, and something that I’m going to have to consider, is that in the
early part of my career, these formal considerations were woven into the
texture of the film itself. That was something I began to surrender
around the time of Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter. The thing about a
film is that at the end of the day, to get the budget, you have a ninety
minute scenario that is used as a blueprint for finding financing, so
there is that formulaic aspect of it. This new film I’m working on,
which is called Adoration, is an attempt to bring these formal issues
back into the narrative format.
David Markus is the last born child of Generation X. A disaffected
critic and belle-lettrist, he writes for the Brooklyn Rail and resides
in New York City and in the eastern Quebec countryside.
PHOTO CAPTION: Atom Egoyan and Kutlug Ataman with stills from their work
‘Auroras/Testimony’
http://www.saatchi-gallery.c o.uk/blogon/2007/06/atom_egoyan_in_conversation_wi .php