The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

186 Atom Egoyan
always find that images and the making of images were something outside of
their day-to-day lives, and that’s obviously been completely reversed.
The unfortunate side is that not only is the image-making process completely
available to us, but the marketing and the industry have also become
very commonplace. People often discuss the success of a movie, and there’s
the whole idea of involving the viewer. That’s the other crucial thing: Many
of the films that I’ve adored would not be able to survive a preview process.
There’s absolutely no way.
This idea of clarity and that people should know at all times what’s going
on is obviously very attractive from a marketing perspective, but I think it
would completely eviscerate the power of what these movies are about. Our
conversation is a great example. We are still discussing what the opening
sequence in Persona might mean and the wealth of possibilities that can be
read into this piece of work. I believe that’s why it endures.
Marc Gervais wrote that Persona subverts the notion that the nature
of art is to communicate, and one of the reasons that it remains such a
mainstay in film history, in film courses, is that no interpretation seems
capable of including everything. As you look at it now, is it a complete
picture in your head, or are there holes in your own interpretation of it?
Egoyan: It’s not designed to be completely digested at a conscious level; it
can’t be. There are many sequences that may be taking place in the imagination
or in the possible imagination of one of the characters. That’s going to
change from one reading to another. That’s what makes the film exciting.
It both invites and resists interpretation. I think that there are certain
ideas and themes in the film that are clearly at work, but the specific interpretation
of a scene is left quite elusive. For example, there’s the question of
who the boy is at the beginning; it could be any one of a number of characters,
and, most compelling, perhaps it is the artist himself.
The way the child is described later on as being deformed and being
repellent to the mother in a certain way would seem to resist the idea that
he’s the same character we saw at the beginning. Though we also understand
that tense characters are fluid, that the actual visual identification of the
characters is also up for grabs, and that it’s also shifting at all times. It’s part
of the construction of the movie, which is part of the experience of it.