The Steenbeck flatbed editing table is the editing system for celluloid. For most of the history of cinema, lengths of film were passed through cogs, a soft light projected frames onto a translucent plastic screen, and editing decisions were executed with the slice of a specialized guillotine. Farther up the machine’s bed, magnetic film stock provided the audio playback. The Steenbeck is the ultimate expression of the term “analog” — hence its obsolescence in the digital age.
Egoyan pulls back the cover and flicks on the rear-projection lamp. Looped onto the Steenbeck is a print of his telefilm Krapp’s Last Tape (2000), an adaptation of the Samuel Beckett stage play and the last project Egoyan edited on this machine. Since then, all his films have been edited using non-linear digital technology.
Of the several Atom Egoyans, this one exists, in his own words, in the world of his imagination, free from the grind of critical scrutiny and the necessary evil of promotion. The ground floor of the three-storey Victorian house — he lives elsewhere, so the building is effectively his office — contains a vast and haphazard trove of mementoes, most of them pinned up like a first-grader’s valentines.
On one wall is a 1997 note to Egoyan from the Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni. Scribbled on the letterhead of the Hotel Majestic in Cannes, where Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter played in the Official Competition, it reads simply “Auguri” — “Good luck.” On the opposite wall is a fax of a baffled review of another Egoyan film, The Adjuster, from the Fredericton Daily Gleaner, with a handwritten comment below from Egoyan’s long-time producer and collaborator Robert Lantos: “This one’s a gem.” Egoyan points to the latest addition, the crossword puzzle from the June 8, 2008, edition of the New York Times Magazine. The clue for 17 Down is “Ararat director, 2002.”
At this stage in his career, Atom Egoyan is at the height of his estimable powers. This summer, he directed Liam Neeson in a reprise of his stage adaptation of Beckett’s teleplay Eh Joe at New York’s Lincoln Center Festival, a production he first mounted with Michael Gambon at Dublin’s Gate Theatre in 2006. Apart from the moving image, he has also directed opera and theatre in major centres in Europe and North America. As we speak, he is preparing to fly to Los Angeles, where he is trying to drum up financing for his next film project, Seven Wonders.
Last May, he was in Tel Aviv to receive a share of the $1-million Dan David Prize (given in 2008 for “creative rendering of the past”), which he split with the English playwright Tom Stoppard and the Israeli writer Amos Oz. Then he flew straight to the Cannes Film Festival, where his latest film, Adoration, had its world premiere.
Of the many great moments in Adoration, one comes about two-thirds of the way through. A character in an online video forum — a critical motif in the film — says, “There is a deep, earthy satisfaction in seeing the consequences of your actions.” This is true for the Atom Egoyan who likes watching the reels go round, who sits writing in this safe space surrounded by his keepsakes. But for another Egoyan, the public intellectual, the consequences of his actions — namely his films — can cause exquisite torture.
Unlike many of his peers, Egoyan reads his reviews and takes them seriously, even the one from the Daily Gleaner. His last two films elicited the harshest critiques of his career. “Critique” is an understatement: Ararat, a film within a film that contrasted historical and contemporary views of the Armenian genocide, earned him death threats from outraged Turks. By comparison, Where the Truth Lies was dismissed as a failed genre exercise. For many critics, Adoration is a return to form.
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