“But from my lie this did come true”: The fall of Atom Egoyan’s 'The sweet hereafter and hook tender'. \n
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My thesis consists of two interrelated projects. The first analyzes legal and aesthetic testimony in Atom Egoyan’s film The Sweet Hereafter. “But From My Lie This Did Come \nTrue” is an extended meditation on falling: literal accident, communal loss, ethical lapse, and imagistic and linguistic vertigo. Falling is this film’s instigating event, but falling is also a figure for trauma, and its capacity to make reference itself fall. By definition, a trauma exceeds our ability to contain and communicate what we have witnessed or survived. How then can it be possible to testify to a traumatic event and its effects? In dialogue with Paul de Man, Jean Luc Nancy, Sigmund Freud, and Cathy Caruth, I argue that The Sweet Hereafter reveals how one fall can powerfully reference another. \nMy aim is not simply to apply theory to a film, but also to explore how the film reconfigures the theory. Just as Egoyan’s work adapts a novel to the cinema, my project adapts film to the essay form. \nThe second part of my thesis excerpts Hook Tender, a novel inspired by archival research and oral history, including travels to BC logging camps and Canada’s Arctic. \nHook Tender explores falling through the actual labour and visceral experience of felling trees. Set in an immigrant logging camp on Canada’s West Coast, the narrative \nalso dramatizes falling in the ethical and psychological dimensions addressed in my essay. An accidental fall causes Eva to lose a child through still birth, and this loss \ninstigates an emotional crisis and moral lapse as she begins an adulterous involvement with Charlie, an Inuit logger who communicates injustices survived by Indigenous communities. \nSo both sections of my thesis offer a sustained reflection on falling: its broken narratives, questionable bearing of testimony, and the incalculable power of its emotional charge. \n
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".