Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | Take One

How do we know what we know? Atom Egoyan's Where the Truth Lies.

Article Excerpt
"People are always interested to know what they look like when they are pretending." Leonard Cohen to Donald Brittain in Ladies and Gentlemen ... Mr. Leonard Cohen

Eighteenth--century Irish philosopher George "Bishop" Berkeley would have loved the films of Atom Egoyan. Berkeley's famous dictum Esse est percipi, which translates as "to be is to be perceived," describes not only an organizing principle in the material construction and experience of cinema itself, but also the dominant animating energy of Egoyan's dramas of knowledge and identity. Indeed, fundamentally the cinema of Atom Egoyan is a set of epistemological investigations. All of his films, in one way or another, orbit around a single enormous question: How do we know what we know?

This uncertainty, the idea of not being sure, is the most productive formal and thematic strand in Egoyan's work, from the reinvention of identity in Next of Kin to the self-conscious character artifices in Speaking Parts and The Adjuster, to the technologically mediated relationships in Family Viewing and Calendar, to the jigsaw puzzles of time and memory in Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, to the interrogations of personal and political history in Ararat. At once affirming and contesting Berkeley's assertion, Egoyan's gnarled cinema of uncertainty explores fugitive personal cartographies of who we think we are, who others think we are, who we might actually be or who it is we are pretending to be. In over two decades of work, Egoyan's has sculpted an idiosyncratic and engaging filmography out of the often opaque mysteries of knowing or, more precisely, of not knowing.

While undeniably more commercial in tone and generic in construction than his previous films, Where the Truth Lies,...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!