Frontiers in Atom Egoyan’s Films: Identity, Imagination, and Crossing through Images
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With many thanks to David Goldie for his advice 1Atom Egoyan is a Canadian filmmaker, born in Egypt in 1960, to parents of Turkish nationality, the descendants of Armenian refugees.This amalgamation of identities feeds his work, particularly his earliest films.The frontier theme is expressed in different ways: a symptom of a problematic search for a cultural identity, a relationship to an imaginary territory, a confusing boundary between past and present, reality and imagination, or even between cinema, video, and photography.2 Scenes at customs check points are noticeably frequent in Atom Egoyan's films: Exotica (1994), Felicia's Journey (1999), Ararat (2002), Adoration (2008), Remember (2015).For travellers, crossing a border is never a mere formality; they have something to hide, a secret to preserve: the smuggled eggs of protected birds (Exotica); fruit which is not allowed to be imported (a pomegranate that Saroyan, the fictive filmmaker in Ararat, wants to bring into Canada); drugs (that Raffi, the young man in Ararat, is unknowingly carrying); a gun (Zev's tool of vengeance in Remember); or even a bomb (at least in Simon's fiction in Adoration, where the orphan, Simon, is writing a play in which he pretends that his father, of Lebanese origin, had tried to kill his mother while she was carrying him, by booby-trapping her suitcase).In these scenes at customs, characters face their identities: in Ararat, the customs officer reminds Raffi of the fact that he is the son of an Armenian terrorist.In Adoration, the fictive customs scene questions Simon's Arabic ancestry which, until this point, had been denied (his maternal grandfather is the only survivor able to tell him who his father was, but the old man is a racist and pretends that Simon's father deliberately killed his mother in a car accident). 3Peter in Next of Kin (1984) and Van in Family Viewing (1987) face similar identity issues.Van rebuilds his Armenian identity by helping his grandmother.Peter completely fabricates his identity, transforming from Peter, the useless son of a middle-class Frontiers in Atom Egoyan's Films: Identity, Imagination, and Crossing through...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".