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'Subtitles: on the Foreignness of Film' Edited by Atom Egoyan ...

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  • 'Subtitles: on the Foreignness of Film' Edited by Atom Egoyan ...

    Time Out
    January 05, 2005

    'Subtitles: on the Foreignness of Film' Edited by Atom Egoyan and Ian
    Balfour MIT Press, Alphabet City Media GBP 22.95;
    Books: Preview


    Few filmmakers are as curious about the nature, role and effect of
    images as Atom Egoyan.

    Whether in his singular features (from 'Family Viewing' through 'The
    Adjuster' and 'Exotica' to 'The Sweet Hereafter' and 'Ararat') or his
    gallery installations, he has consistently investigated the
    implications of looking, of the gaze both loving and surveilling, and
    explored the psychology and technologyof a society fascinated by
    ocular pleasures and prohibitions. Couple that with his biography
    Armenian by ethnicity but born in Cairo and living in Toronto and you
    have a sensibility perfectly placed to take on the titular enquiry of
    this handsomely designed (in cinematic 1.66:1 ratio) 550page volume.

    The claim Egoyan and academic Ian Balfour make is that 'every film is
    a foreign film, foreign to some audience somewhere, and not simply in
    terms of language'. Indeed, this sense of difference is perhaps
    central to cinema itself, creating as it does both intimacy and
    distance in its viewing.

    Egoyan and Balfour take subtitles as their point of departure for a
    consideration of how film works both to bridge divides while still
    offering an 'otherness'. So, among the two dozen contributions,
    poetic and playful, theoretical and experiental, are essays by
    Borges, Frederic Jameson and Slavoj Zizek; writing on Kiarostami, CNN
    and Jarman's 'Blue' and interviews with ClaireDenis and Isaac Julien,
    alongside a number of artists' portfolios. It's an invigorating,
    widescreen experience, celebrating the medium's diverse aesthetic
    potentials, but also arguing for a reconsideration of how the Western
    media portrays the majority world. As the editors say, 'What we need
    are subtitled images not an embedded journalist's commentary that
    extend, rather than preclude, the possibility of relating to others.'
    Gareth Evans
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