Speaking a/part: Modalities of Translation in Atom Egoyan’s Work

The Canadian artist Atom Egoyan (b. 1960) is perhaps best known for his sustained inquiry into the nature of the image and the technology of the screen. From early films such as Open House (1982), which features a man projecting slides onto bed sheets in his own home, to features such as Family Viewing (1987) and Speaking Parts (1989) in which television and home video screens begin to proliferate as they are at once framed by and engulfing the cinematic image, to films such as The Adjustor (1991) and Calendar (1993) in which photographs take on fetishistic qualities, to a project he is working on at the time of this writing (2007) in which two characters in different movie theatres send images of what they are watching to each other over their cell phones, Egoyan has consistently set out to explore our relationships to the dominant image-making technologies of our time. The complexity with which he treats the image and image-making has been amply treated in the critical literature about his work.  However, I wish to make the case that Egoyan has also offered a sustained inquiry into the workings of languages and translation, work which is all the more important because at this time, much of the critical literature on globalization, transnationalism, migrancy, and diaspora is surprisingly silent on these questions, as indeed is much of the literature on Anglophone Canadian cinema.