Press coverage

Sight and Sound, March/April 2002

The Independent on Sunday, 17 February 2002:
"There is a film library in Toronto that holds an exhaustive archive of material from the career of Canadian director Atom Egoyan. Its bulky catalogue meticulously itemises scripts, correspondence, production files and video material, the 25-page list of materials from one feature alone comprising 559 separate items – film reels, videos, DAT tapes. The business of cinema is notoriously cumbersome, the weightless image we see on screen leaving behind a huge residue of physical matter, voracious for storage space. Digital technology may be rapidly eclipsing those systems – celluloid, reel-to-reel, paper – that once embodied what Egoyan calls "the graven image". But Egoyan is concerned that we shouldn't forget the old ways too quickly, and it's in homage to them that he has devised Steenbeckett, his new installation for art impresarios Artangel, opening this week in London."
(Jonathan Romney - read full article)

Time Out, 13 - 20 February 2002:
"There's talk of abandoned archives, talismanic objects, film being worked for the memories it can yield. At once precise and ambiguous, like the editing table and the ascetic playwright from which it takes its collided name, Steenbeckett promises a singular encounter with a provactive, disquieting artist." (Gareth Evans)

The Guardian, 16 February 2002:
"Film directors who make installations often seem to splash fake significance everywhere. But Egoyan's sombre imagination and unsettling sense of space make his commission by Artangel a sensual goodbye to cinema."
(Jonathan Jones - read full article)

Time Out, 27 February - 6 March 2002:
"At the heart of the piece is a segment of Egoyan's latest film of Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. John Hurt plays the old man who, in taking stock of his life, listens to a tape he made at 39 in which he recalls a love affair that ended ten years earlier. Grappling with an archaic tape deck, Hurt addresses his past and his future in the form of the new tape he is recording. He shouts into the microphone, at his former lover 'once wasn't enough for you'; really, though, he is addressing himself - 'the stupid bastard I was 30 years ago' - rather than the woman who provoked this ongoing dialogue with failure.

"After watching Hurt's impressive performance on a giant screen, you stumble into a dark room where the film plays at the far end, on a small monitor atop a Steenbeck. Separating you from the screen is a maze of celluloid; winding through dozens of sprockets, 16mm film criss-crosses the space on its way to the outdated machine.' As scratches and dust gather,' Egoyan explains, 'the sound and image will deteriorate more and more, while the digital projection next door remains perfect.'" (Sarah Kent)

Sight and Sound, March/April 2002:
"In his recent novel Slowness, Milan Kundera suggests that people slow down to remember and speed up to forget. This evocative notion, conceiving of memory as a place to linger in or avoid, finds fruitful embodiment in Atom Egoyan's new Artangel commission Steenbeckett. It's an ambitious work, marrying footage from his film version of Samuel Beckett's monologue Krapp's Last Tape with the technology of image delivery, in this case the Steenbeck celluloid-editing deck. That this installation, the filmmaker's first fully site-engaged initiative, is realised in the empty interior of London's former Museum of Mankind, an ethnographic collection that once displayed the collective memories of the species, underscores the negotiation between different elements that characterises Egoyan's work." (Gareth Evans)

Frieze, Issue 67, May 2002:
"'Behind every hot new working computer is a trail of bodies’, writes Steward Brand in The Clock of the Long Now (1999): ‘… extinct computers, extinct storage media, extinct applications, extinct files.’ Atom Egoyan’s Steenbeckett (2002), installed in the former Museum of Mankind in central London, addressed this issue of technological obsolescence, taking Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) as its starting point and muse. In Steenbeckett, Egoyan’s own film of Beckett’s play was employed as one of several linked elements which he framed and reframed in a complicated meditation on the nature of memory, technology and the preservation of the past." (Peter Suchin - read full article)