My Mother Is an Alien: Ten Takes on Life and Film

George Melnyk. My Mother Is an Alien: Ten Takes on Life and Film. Banff: The Banff Centre Press, 2004. iv + 144 pp. $18.95 cloth. In his book One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema, Melnyk identifies three different kinds of writers who take Canadian film as their subject: journalists, academics and film historians. An academic, Melnyk adopted the persona of film historian for the masterful One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema. In My Mother Is an Alien: Ten Takes on Life and Film, Melnyk eschews traditional approaches to film, transforming himself into an autobiographer Both books were published in 2004, and My Mother Is an Alien can be seen as a kind of companion piece to One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema; it garnishes the objective facts with memories, reveries, and emotion. Using a highly literary style, Melnyk ruminates about faith, identity, politics, writing, fathers, mothers, cars, and film in My Mother Is an Alien. The book is divided into three sections: faith, writing, and family, with ten chapters focused on one or two films each. Of these films nine are Canadian and four are from other nations. His Canadian choices are somewhat surprising. He includes a few of the expected classics, Mon Oncle Antoine (Claude Jutra, 1971), Jesus of Montreal (Denys Arcand, 1989), and Leolo (Jean Claude Lauzon, 1992), but also writes about Cube, a 1998 science fiction thriller that broke box office records for Canadian film in Japan and France (134). Melnyk pairs Leolo with Guy Maddin's Cowards Bend the Knee, which was originally presented as a gallery installation at the International Film Festival in Rotterdam in 2003. His other choices include the Alien trilogy (thus the book's title), (Richard Attenborough, 1982), Das Boot (Wolfgang Peterson, 1981), and Strawberry and Chocolate (Tomas Gutierrez Alea, 1993). The discussions in each chapter are often supplemented by other relevant films, most notably Before Night Falls Julian Schnabel, 2000) and Bitter Sugar (Leon Ichaso, 1996) in the chapter on Alea's film. While inspired by the genre of film criticism, My Mother Is an Alien is not strictly a book of film criticism. Instead, this work resides at the intersection of self and cinema. It seems to have its roots in psychology and various branches of philosophy, including ontology, metaphysics, epistemology, and existentialism. It is ultimately a memoir; Melnyk uses the films as a jumping-off point for his personal reflections on life, self, growth, and change. Recounting the experience of watching these films, Melnyk reveals more about himself than he does about the films listed above. But he does not apologize for this inward focus. Rather, he grounds it in film theory--specifically, in theories of spectatorship. As he notes in his introduction, a film becomes what it is only through the viewers who watch it, and as such, it means something different to each viewer. We make meaning of films as we relate them to our lives and to our unique individual experiences. Melnyk is doing in print what we all do when we watch a film and make it our own. In this sense, he is modeling the process of spectatorship; with My Mother Is an Alien he foregrounds the fact that watching a film is a very personal experience. Some of the book's chapters are only loosely about film, particularly When Cuba Speaks English We Have Strawberry and Chocolate, which ends up being an exploration of the relationship between writing and politics in Cuban literary history Similarly, the chapter About Gandhi is more about Melnyk's personal spiritual journey and a laurel fig tree that he named after the Mahatma than about himself. …

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