Abstract
This article studies the imaginary geography of Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan's film Calendar and articulates the difference between the film's reflexive narrative concept of global flows and representational concepts of the social sciences. The film tells the story of a couple who travels to Armenia to photograph churches. The story's compelling visibility arises from the difference between a familiar first-world space and that exotic other space of rural Armenia. Calendar is also an exploration of identity, memory, and communication-image technology, and its figuration of these themes must take the place of what the film needs to represent but cannot do so positively: the difference between overdevelopment and underdevelopment. Having to invent some way of representing this difference is the film's narrative form problem for which Calendar's allegory is its filmic solution. The allegory depends on a “stereotype montage” and provides cultural studies a model for critical self-reflexivity.
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