A had asked for some comments on the Egoyan shorts. Belated, but nevertheless...

A, you are right about Egoyan being more experimental with his shorts (at least from what I have seen till now). "Howard In Particular", "Peepshow" and "Open House" share the same interest in technology and the manner in which it mediates experience (as in his features), but he takes more stylistic risks with them. On one level, Howard, Peepshow and Open House deal with audio recording (disembodied voice), the photo-machine and the telephone, but in each of the films, a different sort of relationship is set up between the user and the gadget, leading to widely different experiences. Howard, which he made while he was still a student, uses the diembodied voice to talk about power and surveillance. An old man on his retirement day is directed to an empty room with a tape recorder that plays a speech by his boss, recounting several things that he did as an employee in the company. "Peepshow" is an istallation-like film playing with the technology of an instant photo booth. A man enters the booth to get himself photographed and bizarre visuals emerge from this encounter. The use of colour is particularly striking. My favourite, however, is "Open House" because it allows you to read it in many ways. It is a simple story of a man (posing as a real estate agent) who takes a couple to see a house. When the couple seem to get serious about buying the house, the man (who is revealed to be the son of the house) uses a phone trick to tell them that an earlier customer has just bought the house. In short, you are left with the feeling that this little rigmarole is staged repeatedly by the son, but you are not told why. He brings prospective buyers to his own house, only to tell them, while theyare looking at the property, that it has just been sold! The sinister feel of the film is mostly the result of some brilliant camera-work. None of the characters emerge as "normal" people (except, perhaps the wife to some extent) because of the way the camera chooses to shoot them. Most of them lie to each other about themselves, but the most sinister moments are when the camera captures them in close-ups and they think nobody's observing them. The camera as a violent interloper, is foregrounded in this lovely little film, in a way that comments on the ruses of technology (the phone trick, the slide projector that the father plays with like a maniac behind a closed door) via another, more powerful technology that is able to show up the trick for what it really is. A sense of decay pervades the film - from the shrouded furniture and the ailing father to the derelict backyard. And amidst this sense of doom, the characters play out a weird tale of social courtesy around the fictive event of buying/selling a house.

M