PDF: Book Review: Best Canadian Screenplays by Douglas Bowie

Book Reviews
Michael Zryd
86
NOTES
I.
"
h' 0 of Film: Commonplace Notes and
Hollis Framy~on" f,or,:c ~~~~. Ist{R~chester NY: Visual Studies Workshop
Hypotheses, In Ore es oJ onp'.>lOn
,
2,
Press, 1983), 109.
d h I
{BI omington: Indiana University Press,
Bill Nichols, Ideology an t e mage
0
,
1981),172,
Micbllel Zryd
New York University
Douglas Bowie and Tom Shoebridge, eds. Best Canadian
. Screenplays. Qgarry Press. 439 pp.
Atom Egoyan. Speaking Parts. With an introduction by Ron
Burnett. Coach House Press, 1993. 175 pp.
There is no doubt of the need for scripts of Canadian films to ~e
edited annotated and published or that these things seldom:ccur. Whl~:
both ~f these books are welcome under the ci~cumstan~es, ~r;~rt~r~:: t
p~eparation a~d pr~dU~t1o~~u:~::;s,
Cilnadi~n
extremes of quality in
Best
and defensive introduction and pre ace y t e
't r It is a fat and
Screenplays is intended mainly for the student screenbv:rdl,e. A ceur hours
, h b'
'nt and poor 10 mg,
ll ••
it
to
apart. This is a shame and
su ests that students will find it a frustratlOg purchase. , .
ggWhether these are the five best Canadian screenplays IS, to
th~
least uestionable-and co-editor Douglas Bowie rightly ~ua 1 les 1
as "fiv~ of our best," Two of scripts represent dassilcaAI can,on1(cal ~l~~;
b D Shebib) and Mon Onc e ntome by
Goin' Down tbe Road ( y on
d likely ephemeral-at least one
Jutras.) The other three are newer an ,
.
ore like1 a work
doubts My American Cousin (by Sandy WIlson) IS an:t'~ t elll (~y Denys
h
Wby Shoot tbe Teacher, Jesus OJ on r
for the ages t an, say,
1
intricate or sophisticated as its
A nd) is as a scrIpt not near Y so
b G
read
'. A nd' ~ oeuvre Tbe Decline oftbe American Empire. T e rey
pre ecessor 10 rca
'.,h
Tbe Far Shore, even on
Fox similarly suffers from companso n WIt, say,
~~~~i:~P~~~v~h:o~:~,:~~ l;e:~~s f~U
;.ri
, Foxs light-headed lyrical terms.
UWU&J.--'MgM
87
Critics or researchers will welcome this volume of scripts but they will
find the volume's lack of apparatus disappointing. There are no credits,
dates of the scripts' preparation or dates of production. The screen writers
each otTer a brief introduction, but oflimited, anecdotal interest. Although
there is indication of script material which was cut in editing, it is unclear
whether the texts were derived from final shooting script or a print of the
final film. (I suspect the former.) Frankly, we are grown used to such
courtesies, for example, in the :University of Wisconsin film script series,
which has set the standard for this sort of thing.
At the other extreme, Coach House's production of Speaking Parts
surpasses these standards. It is almost luxurious and could happily be
mistaken for a better sort of art gallery catalogue devoted to its writer and
director, Atom Egoyan. In addition to the script, there is an introductory
essay by Ron Burnett ofMcGill University, an Egoyan interview with Marc
Glassman, a short and revealing essay by the director, and a well prepared
filmography.
Read this book and several issues come to mind, The first is the
necessity of its elaboration, which is a bit saddening, Egoyan is widely
praised as the leading English-Canadian director of his generation but no
critic has come forward with a cogent account ofwhy he is to be so highly
evaluated. The writing on Egoyan is just "clippings· and, for a director
of his intellectual and artistic ambition, this must be galling. For those of
us who ambivalently admire the idea of Atom Egoyan projected by his
publicity-but have never been able to see that idea realized on the
screen-the wait for someone to show us what we have been missing,
through insensitivity, seems peculiarly long, even inexplicably so now that
his films, and Speaking Parts, especially, have become classroom fixtures.
IfEgoyan is today's exemplum ofexperimentalism in Canadian feature-film
cinema, the least question (though it is also a most polysemous question)
we might like to have answered is "What does Atom Egoyan mean?·
In this respect, appreciation of this volume must be limited to the
ceremonial. Egoyan's interview with Glassman and Burnett's introductory
essay are no help in answering our question, The interview strays away
from Speaking Parts chatters comfortably within the director's familiar press
profile, and then slips into promoting his "breakthrough" (but to what?)
new film Calendar. For that sort of thing we have SUitably perishable
magazines and newspapers.
Burnett's essay is amazingly facile, even for ceremonial purposes. It
is almost the sort of thing a film professor squeezes out if he isn't sure
what to say and reaches for some readymade assertions of aesthetic
importance. These, as usual lately, pertain to themes of disassociated
:WEr
Book Reviews
Bart Testa
88
. "
T
it here are the main bits
subjectivity and narrative dlsJunctlveness. 0 w ,
of Burnett's thesis paragraphs:
E
0
an is concerned with the relationship betW~en image and identi~:
h~ ~Im proposes that images have transformed the pers~nal and ~ubh~
spaces between his characters. It suggests that there IS" n( 0 JPomtLuoc
,
'
"
nd zero as eanseparation between image and Identity, no grou
, d
Godard once called it) where reality and image can be poslte as
different from each other. As the opening shots,of the film ~,veal, t.;re
seems to be a point of departure and no end point where ~ I~ pro ~~r~
alion of ima es can be explained with the kind of dept or w IC
Egoyan is se;ching. In other words, althou?h the ,film seeks to explore
how its characters grapple with the past, hIstory IS a~sent.
h nd
This sense of fragmentation, bounded by questions 0 trut a
fty drives the narrative of the film forward. Although Ego,yan
:::i~S 'faithful to the idea that a story must b~ told, he. questIons
conventional strategies of storytelling through a dispersal of Image and
'f'
narrative.
The roblem with this reading is that, from a ,commonsense angle,
speakinghrtswon't heel to it. In the film itself "history: ~s unc~~er~d~~e
source of Clara guilt, enigmatic in "the opening shots, IS exp me
y
by the last shots (as if we hadn't figured it long be~ore).. M~r:o~ser~
"history" is re-presented throughout, for Clara has WrItten It ( h
h
scriptwriter), Lance (the actor) has read it, and it bears the mar~.o f trut
for both of them. It is, of course, betrayed by the villain, t.he SlOlster TV
producer, but that betrayal only confirms the truth of .1ts :epresentation-by making such an issue of suppressing and deformmg .1t. .
Image and identity are constantly asserted to be different 10 t?lS film.
The whole plot hinges on this difference. Moreover, Egoyan ~ ,blunt
rhetoric places video footage and film footage in sharp juxtapOSItIon to
express this difference. Even 'a child could grasp what Clara and Lance
.
d t h at th ey p1ay the .difference out,
recognize-this dIfference-an
mutual masturbation, recriminations, and all the rest of It. Lance knows
he is betraying Clara's private truth (Burnett's "history") for the,sake of
a commercialized, that is videographed, public fiction. So do we. . .
The confused one is Lisa. She is the somnambulisti~ chambermal~ 10
love with Lance's naked S/M video image (see this book s cover): Hangmg
out with orgy I marriage-videotaper Eddy for much of theplm, L1~~ reve~l~
that she has less savvy than a child. As played by Arsin~e Khan,~an W.1t
g
dazed naivete, Lisa serves in an idiotic capacity as the shght a.mbl g uaun
joker in Egoyan's character deck. But the accent falls on shght. If on;
misses the main plot's dominant theme of truth and memory betraye ,
_ZM,UZ .w
89
Lisa's sub-plot-especially the scenes of video-taping a weddingallows this double of the main story to instruct us with its grimly moralistic
comedy.
As for "fragmentation" and "dispersal" of images, nowhere does
Burnett, or the printed script, tell us why Speaking Parts seems so narratively
fragmented. The reason is simple. Egoyan has broken up his plotting's
straightforward linearity ("a story must be told") through an arch formal
perversity; Speaking Parts relies almost exclusively on alternating syntagmas.
Stripped of normal temporal markers of simultaneity, or punctuating
counterpoints, or much rhythmic energy, this formal structure is arbitrary.
The connections between narrative segments (simply numbered scenes in
the script) seem to have been composed by sleepwalker, hence the film's
sense of disassociation. So, it requires a bit of work on the viewer'sl part
(we also struggle with the tedium of the film's performative meter) but,
before long, we catch on: the disassociative editing pattern is cosmetic.
Clara's enigma (revealed as a truth) and Lance's moral betrayal of it (cast
an opportunism) make up the narrative dominant. The rest is echo and
elaboration. It is, then, pleasant to see our commonsensical grasp of his
film confirmed in Egoyan's essay where he nails the narrative dominant
of his film to the floor and makes it stay there.
Burnett elsewhere opens a door to what Egoyan's mannered decoration
of SpeakingPartsmeans. The TV set in the mausoleum where Clara conducts
her seances probably does, for example, signify incest aping sacrality, as
he suggests. But the film's structure is anything but a denial of history,
memory or identity. If anything, Egoyan's films are about the maddening
attachment to these things. From the start, since his Open House and Next
ofKin, he has gone on (and on) about how sentimentally wrenching the
discovery of them can be. In Clara's mildly deviant case, she possesses
them already and it is their broadcast-through "art" (TVt}-that
promises her (foolish sentimentalist that she is) some confessional release
from her privacy, her gUilt.
Burnett's "transformation" of public and private is not exactly what
"concerns" Egoyan. It is her frustrated will to enact such a transfonnation
that grips Clara and drives the plot. Either the director denies this
transformation is possible, or he is as foolish as she is. In fact, Egoyan
ensures that Clara does not get to try the experiment of turning her history
into a spe!lking part. This is Egoyan's refusal to seem foolish and is
expressed simply by refusing Clara the chance to surrender her miserably
slight private pathos to public images. (Egoyan also drops this shoe in his
essay, but then rolls it under the bed.) So, the plot contrives to steal Clara's
memories and history-actually she sold them-and that permits
Book Reviews
Bart Testa
90
,
athos and even to moralize it, for she
Egoyan to retam her queasy P , . '
d hardl the only one, that
15
becomes the woman betrayed, Th lS 1
a way, an k'ng wYhat he really does
'I
h h
eans an d eaves us as 1
:i;t
intended
indicates that the obvious slgnlfica~ce oflt~ls fil~ w d we never do find
t
and sentimental had it been narratively et out. ns ea ,h d for Egoyan
out what Clara's experiment might have accomplls e ,
d these
~~~~~~~e~t:v:r ~:
~av.e
a~ong the~eu~~~:~~o~:o;::~:~
melodra~at~c b~tr(ah~als, ~)h~~l~gb:y:~~e;;:t~i~g
)
j
I
\
transmutes all into
It
and
1 dive from "machmatlons IS wor
k'
resu ~ er
.
r "theoretical." The narrative strategy of Spea mg
nothl~g more mYthsetenm::SyOways this filmmaker constantly reveals himself
Parts IS one 0 f
.
fit1
k Of course
still to be a man of the theatre more than he ,ls a t mthmea :~~k S/leakin~
.
Id h
ome to me WIth ou
'J:
none of thiS wou
ave c
,.
he dumb cover,
Parts-its script, Burnett's and Egoyan s pieces, even t
which replicates no image in the film.
Bart Testa
University ofToronto
Michele Lagny. De l'Ristoire du cinema. Paris: Armand Colin,
collection "Cinema et audiovisuel", 1992.
Ce livre marque une etape importante dans la reflexion ~utour des1
,
1"
ffet du premIer manue
phenomenes cinematographlques: ,I ,s ,agI~ e~ e "
et sa publication
fran~ais de methodologie consacre a 1hlStolre .~ cI~e::, epistemologiques
tardive comblera de graves lacunes en proposant es a
2em. t 3em • cycles
solides aux chercheurs d e . ,e.
.,'
ose d'entree de jeu la
C'. '
d
Dans son avertissement mmal, MIchele Lagny p .
,
'''p
i et comment Lalt-on e
uestion centrale de son livre, a savoa, ourquo
,
fhistoire du cinema?" (1" 9), pour preciser ensuite que son propos ne vIse
c: '
11 "hl'stoire du cinema" ni a ressasser les rapports
pas a relalre une nouve e
'
d M c
"
t hl'st01're (1' 9) O'ailleurs; sur ce point, les travaux e ar
entre cmema e
. .
, ,
titue une
Ferro servent de reference, cites reguW:rement: Ie c1ne.~a, cons Cinema
"archive" rendant possible une "contre-analyse" de la societe (Ferro,
et bistoire, Paris Denoel-Gonthier, 1977, p, 12~).
l"tude d'un film ne
e que e
.
De Ce point de vue , Michele Lagny rappe
. d
t t mais peut aUSS1
.
1'"
t'analyse du texte et u con ex e,
dolt pas se lmlter a
. I ( 20) Cette
indure des dimensions politiques, economiques, SOCIa es p.
.
1
I
91
operation historiographique peut tout de meme donner lieu a des interpretations divergentes pourtant basees sur les memes sources, comme l'ont fait
Siegfried Kracauer et Lotte Eisner a propos du cinema expressionniste
allemand (po 39).
L'ouvrage se subdivise en cinq chapitres admirablement bien structures.
Le premier, consacre a "la demarche historique", propose logiquement une
reflexion sur la notion de concept historique, grace a des emprunts
frequents et utiles aux historiens. Ainsi, on peut integrer a I'histoire du
cinema proprement dite Ie celebre deplacement epistemologique opere par
Michel. Foucault lorsqu'il statuait qu'i1 n'existe pas, en histoire, "d'objets
naturels (par exemple la criminalite ou la folie), mais seulement des
"objectivation" produites par des "pratiques" (surveiller et punir des
criminels, isoler des fous) qui s'expriment a travers des "discours" (sur'la
folie, la sexualite, laclinique), devenus Ie veritable objet d'analyse de
l'historien ..." (po 48). L'attitude de Jean-Louis Leutrat, par exemple,
s'inspire des travaux de Foucault lorsqu'il affirme que les differents
dispositifs de production, d'elaboration et de reception d'oeuvres filmiques
peuvent, en tant que discours, "devenir objets d'etudes historiques. Le
travail de l'historien peut consister (entre autres), a rendre compte de ces
discours, par consequent de ces dispositifs, a en rendre compte historiquement, c'est-a-dire relativement." (Cite par M. Lagny, p. 49).
Les pages consacrees a la methode historique eclairent de fa~on
nouvelle et utile notre reflexion sur les films. Pour Michele Lagny, "la
methode critique" est au fond Ie seul element sur de la "methode historique" (p. 53). L'histoire distingue la critique d'authenticite (prov'enance,
daration) de la critique "de restitution" (evaluation des "fautes" du texte,
qui peuven r etre volontaires-falsificarions-ou involontairesproblemes de conservation) (p, 54).
Cette double critique qui peut considerer Ie film comme un veritable
document d'archive permet d'etablir un degre d'authenticite, Cette evaluation,
particulierement pertinente dans les cas d'oeuvres reconstituees, donne la
possibilite au chercheur d'attribuer les manquements ou les varianres de la
version d'un film a la negligence du restaurateur ou plutot aux avatars du
temps.
Puis dans un deuxieme temps d'une critique "de credibilite", qui engage
successivement les critiques "d'interprcration" (du texte), "de competence"
(du temain par rapport aux faits rapportes), de sincerite, d'exaetitude (par
rapport ace que Ie remoin pouvait savoir), Au terme de toutes ces operations,
on opere un ..controle", par recoupement des documents les uns par rapport
aux autres (p, 54),