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Film Notes:
CALENDAR
CALENDAR (Canada/Armenia/Germany 1993, 74 min., color, in English
and Armenian)
Director: Atom Egoyan; screenplay: Atom Egoyan; producers: Atom
Egoyan, Arsinee Khanjian, Robert Lantos; cinematography: Atom Egoyan
(8mm video images) and Norayr Kasper; editing: Atom Egoyan; sound
recorder: Yuri Hakobian. Produced by: Ego Film Arts; distributor:
Zeitgeist Film.
CAST: Arsinee Khanjian (wife/translator); Ashot Adamyan (driver/guide);
Atom Egoyan (photographer); Michelle Bellerose, Natlia Jasen, Susan
Hamann, Sveta Kohli, Viva Tsvetnova, Roula Said, Annie Szamosi,
Anna Pappas, Amanda Martinez, Diane Kofri (female guests).
For an overview of Atom Egoyan's films and an interview with the
director, see
"Family
Romances: An Interview with Atom Egoyan" in Cineaste
(Dec 1997).
Another site devoted to Egoyan's work: The
Egoyan Nucleus: Web Guide to Atom Egoyan -- contains useful
segments on each of Egoyan's feature films and a list of resources.
Discussion questions:
1) Egoyan has written: "In conceiving Calendar, I wanted
to find a story that would deal with three levels of Armenian consciousness:
Nationalist, Diasporan, and Assimilationist." Discuss the ways
in which these levels of consciousness are realized in the film,
through the relationship between the Armenian-Canadian photographer,
his wife and their guide in Armenia and through Egoyan's choice
of different images to represent Armenia.
2) Consider the ways in which Egoyan intertwines the stories of
an assimiliated immigrant's loss of his homeland andthe disintegration
of his marriage.
3) Atom Egoyan's cinema has often been concerned with the ways
in visual and aural technologies (video, photography, telephones,
fax machines, film) mediate people's experiences and emotions in
complex ways. Discuss how photography, video, film and the telephone
function in Calendar, particularly for the photographer who
takes pictures of Armenian church ruins for a calendar and documents
his trip to Armenia on video.
4) In discussing Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation, we talked
about the role of memory, nostalgia and loss in the exile's experience
and her recreation of a 'provisional home' in writing. How does
Egoyan represent memory and nostalgia in his film? Remember that
Egoyan says in his interview with Hamid Naficy that "the role
of memory has changed because memory has now been surrendered, at
least partially, to a mechanical process,[the video recording of
images]."
5) Calendar is also about the ways in which the denial of
history, the submersion of ethnic identity, and the non-acknowledgment
of loss lead to a kind of ritual enactment or compulsive repetition
of loss.Comment on the photographer's arrangement of various "dates"
in Toronto and his playback of the videos made in Armenia in light
of this subject.
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