Remote Control: Censoring Diasporic Identities in Atom Egoyan’s Films

Abstract

In Atom Egoyan’s films, the practice of home movies and the use of VCRs often signify the emergence of repressed representations associated with unacknowledged urges. Protagonists are involved in complex negotiations over definitions of identities that combine the sexual, the national and the aesthetic in attempts to overcome the trauma of loss and displacement —common features in a typology of diasporic experience. The theme of censorship in its various guises, through the recurrent trope of smuggling and the illicit crossing of boundaries watched over by literal and figurative variations on the figure of the censor, is central to an approach to the films and is shared with other diasporic filmmakers. The allegories of censorship that pervade Egoyan’s films testify to the diasporic condition as split selves are torn between several conflicting agendas and these creative tensions in turn surface as dynamic inspiration for the films. In the end, the cinematic apparatus itself is confronted with its own mirror image in a global context in which contending for the right to define boundaries is no longer a binary conflict opposing enlightened avant-garde directors and backward state censorship.

Keywords

• South-Asian Diaspora
• Egoyan Atom
• Canadian cinema