8½ Screens

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
2010

8½ Screens
Atom Egoyan
4 minute loop
35mm, Black and White

Atom Egoyan’s discomfort and fascination with the relationship between viewer and viewed finds a perfect match in the famous projection room sequence in Federico Fellini’s 8½. Egoyan reverses the relationship between projector, audience and screen in this bravado deconstruction of our cinema #4. A projector stands on stage, boldly spewing out light. Screens catch that light at different points throughout the venue: Fellini’s various audiences—some angry, some in love, some bored, plus a freaked-out director—occupy their own spaces. The audience is left to work out their own place in this upside-down world. Gradually, we feel their interconnectedness; then we begin to reconstruct an alternative mode for viewing films through Fellini’s eyes. This composite, non-linear experience gently critiques the Essential 100 list itself by elucidating the powerful subjectivity of the film-viewing experience and our consequent unreliability as judges of the work; our ecstatic engagement with great cinema, Fellini asserts, should preclude a simple logical ordering of the film-watching experience.

The work also reveals some of the key features of the filmmaker’s feature film strategies. Egoyan is famous for his ability to layer various forms of voyeurism within his narrative structures, and 8½ Screens becomes a partial Egoyan taxonomy, a breakdown of the various mechanisms we use to understand desire and the gaze, within and outside the cinema space. One finds moments of Exotica, Felicia’s Journey and especially The Adjuster in the faces on these screens.

Egoyan is one of the few major filmmakers working today who moves consistently back and forth between installations and feature filmmaking. The relationship between the two is a complex one for him: sometimes the dialectic feels preparatory for future work and sometimes feels like a double-barrel approach to accessing cultural and historical information. In some of his best work (like 2006’s Citadel), the final product becomes a legacy gift, an album of images and thoughts for his son. Perhaps, then, 8½ Screens also functions as a cautionary tale, an explanation of why one becomes a creative person and the frustrations that such a choice can provoke in the people around us.
—Noah Cowan