SOURCE: “Memories of Overdevelopment: Up and Atom,” in Film Comment, Vol. 25, No. 6, November–December, 1989, pp. 27–29.

[In the following essay, Taubin explores Egoyan's use of technology as a metaphor in Speaking Parts and Family Viewing.]

The very voluble Atom Egoyan is hesitant to say how small the budget was for Speaking Parts, his third feature. He has a theory about recent independent films—that by conforming to Hollywood production standards, they've begun to attract a broader audience. Broader, that is, than the audience for grimy, grainy 16mm. With its gracefully arcing camera movement, spookily luminous interiors, and arresting, though totally unknown, actors, Speaking Parts looks a lot more expensive than its “well under a million dollar budget,” which is as close to specific as Egoyan's willing to get now that the film is making the festival circuit and a U.S. opening is likely around the New Year.

It's questionable whether your average viewer will find attractive visuals and subtle acting a sufficient reward, given Speaking Parts evasive, fragmented narrative, shifty-eyed, narcissistic characters and morbidly chill tone. Actually the film's most appealing quality is its gallows humor, to which the New York Film Festival audience made frequent, audible response. In short, Speaking Parts is not exactly sex, lies, and videotape, although it's hard to imagine a more appropriate title for not only this film, but Egoyan's entire oeuvre. Speaking Parts was screened in the Director's Fortnight at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival where sex, lies, and videotape won the competition; Egoyan admits that he was so upset by Soderbergh's title (i.e. that he hadn't thought of it himself) that he's yet to see the film.

Egoyan was born in 1960 in Egypt of Armenian parents. His family emigrated to Canada when he was three years old, but he didn't learn English until after his grandmother was placed in an old-age home four years later. “I resented her being sent away but that's when my assimilation began,” Egoyan remarks, savoring the contradiction. It's tempting to relate Egoyan's insistence on holding back verbal information at the openings of his films to this childhood experience of alienation. In Speaking Parts, eight minutes lapse before the first bit of dialogue occurs, and it's twice that before one begins to grasp the situation. The beginning of Family Viewing, Egoyan's previous film, is equally enigmatic and disorienting. Egoyan ascribes his idiosyncratic expositions to his desire to break “the Hollywood rule about needing to grab the audience in the first ten minutes.”

While majoring in international affairs at the University of Toronto, Egoyan made several short films, one of which was broadcast on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). He used the TV sale to partially finance Next of Kin, his first independent feature, which CBC also televised, leading to his being hired to direct In This Quarter, a one-hour TV show about an IRA terrorist who becomes involved with an Irish-Canadian boxer. “The action sequences in In This Quarter caught the eye of some commercial producers and I was hired to direct episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone, two American TV series shot in Toronto,” Egoyan explains, adding that at this point his career became totally schizophrenic.

“My exposure to Hollywood filmmaking taught me what I was up against and clarified my direction. In mainstream production, what's onscreen is the budget—you know that Hollywood expression, ‘The money's all on the screen.’ What's on the screen in independent filmmaking is spirit, an idiosyncratic vision. So instead of coming up with a more mainstream script, as most people expected, I wrote Family Viewing.”

Budgeted at ＄160,000, Family Viewing was financed with private money and state-funded arts grants. Egoyan stayed away from Canadian film production entities like Telefilm because he wanted to retain complete control. Family Viewing was Egoyan's first film to win recognition outside Canada and in a well-publicized incident at the Montreal Film Festival, Wim Wenders asked the jury to turn over his first prize for Wings of Desire to Egoyan.

Relentlessly claustrophobic and intentionally ugly, Family Viewing is about the oedipal struggle between Stan, a video equipment salesman, and his son, Van. Having driven his wife (Van's mother) away and placed her mother (Van's grandmother) in a nursing home, Stan is dedicatedly taping over treasured home video recordings—replacing idyllic images of young Van and his mother romping in the grass with clinically-depicted sexual encounters between himself and his live-in girlfriend, who not-so-secretly also has the hots for Van. With the help of a young woman who works in a telephone sex establishment (where Stan is one of her clients), Van rescues the tapes from Stan's clutches, his grandmother from the nursing home, and his mother from a homeless shelter. He sets up a new household with the three women, while Stan, in frantic pursuit, collapses of a heart attack.

Family Viewing is remarkable, not only for its multiple layering of satire and creepily intimate realism, but for its use of video technology. Stan's bedroom diary and Van's baby pictures were recorded on consumer VHS: the living room scenes involving Stan, Van, and the girlfriend were shot TV sitcom-style with three studio cameras linked by a switcher. Broadcast images from omnipresent TV sets and surveillance camera footage are frequently intercut with the action. Transferred to film, the degraded, degenerated video images function both expressively and metaphorically and depart from the usual 16mm look.

“Video images are suggestive of the images that go on inside people's heads,” Egoyan remarks, adding later that, “there's a profound difference in attitude toward the two mediums video and film. In terms of home movies, everyone using film knows in the back of their minds that they are going to have to pay for a roll. That means no matter how obsessive they are about recording, they have to chose. With video, the process can be indiscriminate. You can record an entire day in real time without any form of selection. That experience of time is extremely dangerous. Some people never look at what they record but by recording something, they make it a possession. It has an effect on the process of memory. We give away responsibility for memory to a piece of technology. I don't think film was so insidious.”

The phrase “family viewing” evokes both the 6pm-8pm broadcast time slot and a funeral parlor ritual. Speaking Parts opens with a video image of a woman wandering through a cemetery. Several shots later, we see the same woman sitting in a mausoleum watching a videotape of her late brother walking toward and away from the camera, home movie style. In both films, video is associated with desire (incestuous and therefore guilty) and loss (abandonment or death).

“In terms of the technology—video mausoleums, videophones—Speaking Parts is set about five years in the future,” Egoyan explains adding that he's heard that they already have videotape mausoleums in Japan.

His insistence on a medicalized, mediated body and a nightmarishly technological future/present environment connects Egoyan to filmmakers like David Lynch, Peter Greenaway, and his fellow Canadian, David Cronenberg. Speaking Parts is, to state the story in the crudest terms, about the making of a movie about organ transplants which takes the form of a TV talk show. “It's preposterous,” he shrugs.

The main setting of Speaking Parts is a hotel which also functions as a movie production office. Lisa (Arsinee Khanjian) a zealously truthful, mopey chambermaid is in love with Lance (Michael McManus), an aspiring actor and Rob Lowe look-alike who also works in the hotel as a steward-cum-hustler. Every night, Lisa rents videotapes of the films in which Lance has been an extra and watches his scenes on a kind of TV shrine. Lance and Lisa never touch or make eye contact. When they cross paths, they look as furtive and guilty as actors in a Bresson film. Occasionally Lisa begs Lance to let her love him.

Lance discovers that Clara (Gabrielle Rose), one of the hotel guests, has written a film. Clara is obsessed with her brother who died after donating his lung to save her life. Her script is about their relationship. She's struck by Lance's resemblance to her dead brother and angles to get him the part. Clara and Lance begin an affair and when Clara goes out of town, they engage in mutual masturbation via videophone.

Egoyan says that while Family Viewing was about the absence of familial love, Speaking Parts is about the withholding of romantic love. Which doesn't mean that it's any less an Oedipal story. The Producer (David Hemblin, who also played the father in Family Viewing) is Speaking Parts' evil genius. His beefy face, with its congealed expression of self-aggrandizement, spreads across the videophone screen, as he supervises the proceedings from some remote location. The Producer has secretly written Clara out of her own story, so that now the film's about two brothers rather than a brother and sister.

Arresting though they are, the characters in Speaking Parts are too self-absorbed to invite identification. Nor does Egoyan intend for them to do so. His basic editing design (repeated throughout the film) involves subverting what at first appears to be a point of view shot—the traditional device for creating audience identification—by following it, not with the usual 180 degree reverse angle, but with a moving camera shot, 90 degrees off to the side. The second shot is not identified with any character. Rather it functions as an intrusion in the scene, as if the camera were not only coming between the characters, but going out of its way to make the audience aware of its gaze. This moving camera, in Egoyan's terms, “is a character”—the absent presence of the filmmaker.

While encompassing the Producer's film, Speaking Parts is also its dreamlike subtext. “A movie that takes the form of a talk show is very original,” the Producer says. “I'd watch it and people have always watched what I like to watch.” Speaking Parts gleefully satirizes the Producer's (mainstream films') banality and also offers another way of telling a story.

The lynchpin in the film's construction is a sequence toward the end in which the suicidal Clara revisits the mausoleum to, once again, watch the video of her brother. One has, until this point, tacitly assumed that Clara shot the tape—that when the brother smiles at the camera, he is, or rather, was, on that happier occasion, smiling at Clara. But this time, the tape runs past its usual cut-off point, and as the shot widens, we're surprised to see Clara, herself, in the upper right corner of the frame, filming her brother with a super-8 film camera. A cut to a head-on close-up of Clara's camera lens adds to the disorientation. Should the shot be read from the brother's POV or from the POV of the mysterious second camera which has taken over the scene? Then Clara slowly lowers her camera to her side. (Egoyan says that for him, this is the most moving moment in the film.) Sister and brother gaze directly at each other in what, for a split second, we naively believe is unmediated intimacy. Then the presence of the camera reasserts itself, and we understand that, like the characters, we've been set up.

It's telling that when Egoyan discusses technology, he focuses so heavily on its domestic use. In both Family Viewing and Speaking Parts, the social structure is imploded so that the family becomes the only operative institution. A claustrophobic immigrant culture is displaced onto a technological one. The recording apparatus is the object of a tug of war between the younger generation who need it to preserve childhood memory (incestuous yearnings) and the bad fathers who employ it to display and extend their power, rewriting personal history in the process. The VCR is a sex toy which fuels forbidden fantasies. All the characters in Family Viewing are bound by blood or marriage, except the two women who function as concubines for the father (one of whom is rescued and then claimed by the son). Sexuality is either incestuous or venal. In Speaking Parts, parental relationships are superimposed on the workplace. The Producer, who's away on business, asserts his authority via a closed circuit TV image, dominating not only production meetings, but the wedding of one of his employees, over whom he also exercises droit du seigneur. Similarly the hotel's head housekeeper is also the madame of its prostitution service, in charge of scheduling and regulating the sexual activities of both staff and guests.

The festishized scraps of home video (of Van and his mother/Clara and her brother), inscribed with incestuous longing and the pain of loss are not only “felt” images, they are the springboard for narrative. Interestingly, they also are the place where the son emerges as leading man. In that sense, Family Viewing resolves positively—Van saves both the women of the household and the tapes (cultural history.) Speaking Parts is a much darker film. Clara's brother, in saving her life, has abandoned her to the whims of the Producer. And Lance, the brother substitute, has no investment in the integrity of Clara's story; he's only too willing to betray it (and her) for the advancement of his own career.

Egoyan comments that, although Van seems like a savior, “he's still his father's son.” Speaking Parts' ironic hall of mirrors suggests a similar complicity between Egoyan (the absent presence behind the camera) and the Producer (who “phones in” his picture.) Both derive power from the manipulation of images.

“If I have a set of concerns and a set of conflicting attitudes, then I have a film,” Egoyan says. “I don't subscribe to a messianic view of filmmaking and I don't disguise the fact that I haven't reached a conclusion. I encourage the audience to be aware that I am photographing people and to be deeply suspicious of my reasons.”