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Watch: An Interrotron-Themed Clip from Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada

There’s a pivotal dramatic beat that occurs about 40 minutes into Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada, out for rental and purchase on digital platforms today, that’s been less remarked upon in many of the reviews and interviews. In the film, Richard Gere plays terminally-ill documentary filmmaker Leo Fife as he gives a final interview for what will be a documentary about his life. Fife’s documentarian, former student Malcolm, is played by Michael Imperioli, who uses for the interview an Interrotron, a device invented by filmmaker Errol Morris that allows a subject to look down the barrel of the camera lens while maintaining, through use of a two-way mirror, eye contact with the interviewer. In one scene, when Fife becomes fatigued, Malcolm suggests taking a break, but Fife reacts angrily, telling him to go back to his “Errol Morris doohickey.” And when Malcolm asserts that Morris’s Interrotron was actually based on Fife’s own discoveries many years ago, Fife dismisses the credit, arguing, “Not me, Sigmund Freud!”

In this clip, Fife explains more about the linkage between the originator of the “talking cure” and the Interrotron, a set-up to that aforementioned dramatic beat, in which, moments later, Fife displaces Malcom from behind the camera, insisting that his wife Emma (Uma Thurman) take his place. For the film’s remainder, Emma becomes both camera eye, confessor and analyst, and much of what’s fascinating about Oh, Canada is watching Thurman, who gives an excellent performance, stoically process the remainder of Fife’s story, which is revealing of adulterous affairs, hidden secrets and imagined fantasies — an alternate history of Fife’s life that is both his final artistic statement as well as personal one.

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