Director chronicles wife’s return

BBC News
July 15 2006

Atom Egoyan’s The Citadel is only receiving a limited release
Canadian-Armenian director Atom Egoyan has taken a major departure
from his intense and often controversial dramas in his new film –
a documentary in which he follows his wife on her first return to
Lebanon in 28 years.

The director is best-known for making the sexually explicit Hollywood
drama Where The Truth Lies – which starred Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon
– and the controversial film Ararat, which explored the real-life
massacre of ethnic Armenians by the Ottoman Empire over four years
from 1915.

The Citadel, however, is a much more personal project, in which he
follows his actress wife returning to her home in Lebanon after a 28
year absence.

"I remembered this footage that I shot on this family vacation to
Beirut – and suddenly I put that into my computer, and I started
playing around with it," Egoyan told BBC World Service’s The Ticket
programme.

"I came up with this idea of having it as a voiceover, and constructing
a letter to our son – talking about his parents’ relationship –
as a sort of time capsule, something he might watch in 10 years or so.

"So it’s an examination of a number of relationships – parent to child
and husband to wife – but also about a woman returning to a city she
had to leave 28 years ago in the midst of the civil war."

Exciting technology

Egoyan admitted The Citadel is an "odd piece" – and that originally
he had not imagined it would be shown to anyone else.

He explained that he has been filming his wife on and off for 20 years
– and that one of the things he hoped The Citadel would explain to
his son is this "strange relationship."

I think if this technology was available when Beckett was alive, it
is something he certainly would have played with

Atom Egoyan "It’s also an opportunity in some ways to look at what
the dynamics of that relationship are – where one part of the couple
is being watched with such a degree of scrutiny all the time," he said.

"That can be very affectionate – as I think it is – but through the
device of the voiceover I’m able to analyse my own motivation for
doing that."

He admitted, however, that his wife is not often very comfortable with
being filmed, and this is one of the reasons the film will receive
only a limited distribution.

Meanwhile, Egoyan explained that The Citadel was one of a number of
documentaries he feels are changing modern cinema, in particular in
contrast with formulaic mainstream content.

"It’s such an exciting time, because of the technology and the fact
that people can record things so easily," he said.

"There was such mystification over how images are made – which is one
of the secrets Hollywood was able to guard for so long. But now you
can have colour, and synchronised, Dolby sound, with a consumer camera.

"The Citadel was shot on mini-DV with a handheld camera, and the
quality is astounding."

Love of Beckett

He has similarly employed this love of new technology in a new
version of the Samuel Beckett play Eh Joe, originally written for
BBC television in 1958.

The play consists of a single camera shot in which a man is alone in
a room. The camera draws ever closer to his face over 30 minutes,
as a woman in the background is heard chastising him with the idea
that he could forget her.

"I loved this piece from the moment I read it in my teens – and most
people don’t know the text, so I thought there had to be a way of
bringing it back to a new public," Egoyan said.

"It’s possible with the new technologies that you could have a live
actor, on stage, behind a scrim – a material that can hold an image
and yet allows you to see through it.

"If you have a camera with a long lens in the wings, observe Beckett’s
specific instructions – but you simultaneously project that on the
scrim. I think if this technology was available when Beckett was alive,
it is something he certainly would have played with."

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress