9 - Archiving the (Secret) Family in Egoyan’s FAMILY VIEWING

Summary

Atom Egoyan's second feature film FAMILY VIEWING (1987) presents many different thematic issues and narrative devices, which the Canadian filmmaker has continued to elaborate on. The family always appears in his work; Egoyan always explores it, albeit in different terms, forms, and intensity, in relation to visual media. In this respect, a close reading of this particular film, relevantly entitled FAMILY VIEWING, will serve to display the relationship between “family” and “viewing” or, more specifically, between the Armenian family and the videographic medium. The relation between the two, as I will argue in this chapter, will be approached through the dichotomy of remembering (in the sense of recognition and inscription) and forgetting (in the sense of denial and erasure) the secret and hidden family h/History. Egoyan's Family Viewing is credited for its depictions of family history in relation to Armenian History. The central question is: what are the implications of FAMILY VIEWING as the recording of a particular family history for the History of the Armenian people? I will argue that what seems to be a clearcut opposition, family history and a people's History, cannot hold for the Armenian Diaspora. Looking at a particular Armenian family here implies a renegotiation of the historical archive; it entails an inquiry into the necessity of “violating” the secrecy of hidden histories.

On an explicit level, FAMILY VIEWING is an ironic portrait of the contemporary predominance of (mass-)mediated family life (as shown in TV programs, home videos, porn videos, video surveillance). The television screen is everywhere and visible in almost every scene of the film. Egoyan appears to be examining the increasing integration of technology into the cozy atmosphere of the Canadian family home. As Jonathan Romney has noted, “Egoyan's perspective on television here appears highly moralistic, inflected with high culture's traditional suspicion of the form.”1 Egoyan's ironic, critical stance towards television, which is surely identifiable in the film, is very related to other Canadian cinematographic productions of the 1980s. For instance, the impact of visual technology (TV and video) on everyday life was a frequent theme for many English-Canadian filmmakers such as David Cronenberg, Patricia Rozema, and Peter Mettler.