The Far Shore (L’Autre Rive)

Tom Thomson's The West Wind, (1917)

 

Tom Thomson's The Jack Pine, (1916-17)

 

Canadian Group of Seven at the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto in 1920

 

THE FAR SHORE (L’Autre Rive)       B+                  

Canada  (105 mi)  1976  d:  Joyce Wieland

And there will be poets like this!  When the eternal slavery of Women is destroyed, when she lives for herself and through herself, when man — up till now abominable — will have set her free, she will be a poet as well!  Woman will discover the unknown!  Will her world of ideas differ from ours?  She will discover strange things, unfathomable, repulsive, delightful; we will accept and understand them.
—Arthur Rimbaud in a letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871

The Far Shore is ... symbolically, a story about Quebec culture overwhelmed by the brute power of English Canada.  On the level of subject matter and symbolism, this may be the most densely Canadian movie ever made.
—Robert Fulford, Globe and Mail, 1997

One of the better films at expressing what is uniquely Canadian, using a fictionalized recreation of actual events, borrowing elements from the life of Canadian painter Tom Thompson (1877 – 1917), a forerunner to a group of Canadian landscape painters known as the Group of Seven, which, when seen in an archival photograph all sitting together in the same room, resemble a group of male academics at a business conference.  Nonetheless, they were a group that resisted commercial development on the open expanse of pristine land, believing in the concept of terra nullius, that land untouched by humans had no sovereign owner and thus remained distinctly and uniquely free.  Canada is such a vast territorial nation, most of it remaining untouched and inaccessible wilderness, where there is inevitably a belief in the mystique of the open frontier, like the Wild West, where original settlers were appalled by the thought of constructing fences on the open range.  Thomson worked as a guide in Algonquin Park, a place he and other artists would visit for inspiration, but they continued to venture into unsettled and unexplored regions further north, where Thompson eventually disappeared during a canoe trip on Canoe Lake in 1917, his body discovered a week later, where the official cause of death was accidental drowning.  Theories have proliferated through the years, some suggesting that Thomson may have committed suicide over his situation with a woman that spent her summers at Canoe Lake who was pregnant and carrying his child.  Many other theories abound as well, including some that suggest he was despondent over his lack of artistic recognition, that he may have been involved in a fatal fight, or perhaps killed by poachers in the park.  What is not in dispute, however, is the distinction of this group of Canadian artists who sketched the landscape or painted the natural splendor of an unspoiled nature.  Similarly, one of the film’s strength is its painterly qualities, contrasting the dark and claustrophobic indoor existence, with each object perfectly placed, to the sunlit spaciousness of the natural world outdoors, using visual composition to emphasize mood and psychological states of mind.  The often dazzling use of color heightens the expressiveness of the setting, illuminating the often under-appreciated décor, artworks, or unexplored world of possibilities surrounding them. 

Something of a cross between D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover and Bo Widerberg’s rapturousy beautiful ELVIRA MADIGAN (1967), Wieland decides to explore this period through a feminist take, as Federal authorities granted women the right to vote in Canada in 1918, two years before the United States and two years after the women in Manitoba became the first to vote at the provincial level.  Women in Québec, however, fared much worse, as both male legislators and leaders of the Catholic Church united against women to deny them the provincial vote until 1940.  By setting the film in Québec in 1918, Wieland and co-writer Bryan Barney emphasize a customary view of women as second class citizens, where not only are their views and opinions not recognized, but society was incapable of accepting women as artists.  Nonetheless, shot on 35 mm, this is given a gorgeous natural palette, much of it set in the pure and unspoiled wilds where nature looks much as it did centuries ago, unsullied by human hands.  A pre-opening credit sequence finds Eulalie (Céline Lomez) in her sun bonnet strolling the lakeside paths of a Québec country landscape of flowers and high grasses on a particularly beautiful summer afternoon in 1919, accompanied by a young girl and Ross (Larry Benedict), who attempts to make his affections and his intentions clear, using the most romantic of all settings to ask for her hand in marriage.  Using a combination of English and subtitled French, he initially misunderstands, where he needs the child to intervene and act as the interpreter, where he is then overjoyed to discover she agrees, moving her from her native Québec into his immaculate mansion in Toronto, complete with servants at their disposal.  With circumstances resembling Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), what’s immediately clear is the suffocating atmosphere, as Ross is a wealthy engineer, the property owner of untold amount of lands, and a man used to having things his way, where a wife is little more than window dressing, a domestic fixture and household ornament that he can look at and have his way with whenever he desires.  He expects obedience and complete subservience, failing to recognize any of the unique attributes she displays.

Living the life of a bird in a cage does not sit well with Eulalie, who always dresses in ornate clothing with intricate flower designs, wearing hats adorned with feathers, a sophisticated woman who often sits at the piano and plays music she wrote, does her own embroidery and dress design, and often sings to herself, much to the displeasure of her husband who finds her habits annoying and disturbing.  She feels much more at home in the presence of a nearby neighbor, Tom McLeod (Frank Moore) in the Thompson role, as he’s an original painter, described by Eulalie as “a man who loves rocks, trees, and a bit of sky,” but he’s also worked for Ross as a guide, as he’s intimately familiar with the northern territory.  Complicating the picture is Ross’s longtime friend Cluny (Sean McCann), who was Ross’s commanding officer during the war, where the two remain devoutly loyal to one another, but Cluny is purely old-school, as he values Tom’s art only through any commercial value it can bring, seeing only the practical side of life.  This accentuates the cultural disparity between the seemingly educated and cultivated English-speaking and the more artistically inclined French-speaking Québec cultures, as the one is constantly at odds with the other.  Wieland emphasizes this through indifferent acting, where the alienated disconnect between characters creates an unworldly effect, only making their distance even more pronounced, where at times the human dimension actually feels uncomfortable to watch, balanced against the unwavering natural beauty of the world outdoors.  Wieland shows men not necessarily as they are, but as women perceive them to be, harsh and uncompromising, also petty, abusive, and unyielding, expecting women to be molded into the image of a man’s wishes, where she’s impertinent if she refuses, while hating herself even more if she complies with his wishes.  Eulalie’s ease with Tom and her obvious displeasure with her overcontrolling husband sends her husband, or more importantly Cluny into jealous rages, as both men (yes, Cluny as well) desire her sensuality, but feel she is flaunting her feelings for Tom in front of her husband, taking advantage of all that has been given to her, where she can live a life of ease and refinement.  That she should want more feels like a flagrant violation of nature to these men, whose innate desire to control women, to the point of rape and even murder, parallels their violation of nature, where in each case they haven’t the capability to comprehend the natural splendor, as all they can do in each case is destroy what stands before them. 

Reason Over Passion (La Raison avant la Passion)

Pierre Théberge (Director of the National Gallery, Ottawa), Joyce Wieland, and Michael Snow

 
 

REASON OVER PASSION (La Raison avant la Passion)       B                     

Canada  (80 mi)  1969  d:  Joyce Wieland

Joyce Wieland has frequently been called a pioneer.  With paint brush, pencil, crayon, watercolour, knitting needles and film she boldly, passionately channeled her art into many untrammeled fields of politics, feminism, death and sexuality long ahead of the pack.

—Iris Nowell, author of Joyce Wieland: A Life in Art

Joyce Wieland is considered one of the most important female artists in Canada, perhaps second only to Emily Carr, an early to mid-20th century British Columbia artist who was famous for painting West coast First Nations imagery, evolving into themes of nature before writing a series of autobiographical works.  Wieland was born in Toronto in 1931, and raised in what she described as “Dickensian poverty,” as she was 7 when her father died and 10 when she lost her mother.  Drawings and comic books helped her deal early on with family loss, where her great grandfather was a clown, while her father and uncles were in Pantomime, so Joyce studied commercial art at the city’s Central Technical School, though her earliest work was in film animation, working for a company directed by George Dunning, who made YELLOW SUBMARINE (1968), where her first job was to animate Niagara Falls.  It was there that she met and married Michael Snow, considered today as one of the most influential experimental filmmakers, through when they moved to New York in the early 60’s, he was more of a professional jazz piano player, where they were part of a burgeoning music and underground film scene, which included wild jazz parties and gallery openings.  After seeing the work of George Kuchar and Jack Smith, she began making her own 8mm films, “People were revealing themselves — so much of it was autobiographical.  There was a whole cinema language that people were inventing — without money,” though by the late 60’s she felt her work was diminished by the male attitudes in the art world, “I was made to feel in no uncertain terms by a few male filmmakers that I had overstepped my place, that in New York my place was making little films. ... There was a tendency within the avant-garde in terms of writing and criticism to underrate my work because I wasn’t a theoretician.  Many of the men were increasingly interested in films about visual theories.  I feel there was a downgrading of my work.  It didn’t get its proper place, its proper consideration.” 

Criticism and skepticism from her male contemporaries accompanied Wieland’s recognition however, and she had a hard time not only disassociating herself from Snow, but in gaining respect amongst her peers, though she did attain widespread acclaim in New York.  Her early work in the 60’s centered around painting, influenced by the abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, who often served as one of her models, where her painting style typified the pop art sexual imagery of the time.  But as the decade progressed, she began exploring different means of expression, including sculpting, lithography, quilts, constructions, assemblages, embroidery, knitting, not to mention cartoons and collages, while also becoming preoccupied with paintings of disasters and death.  By 1967, however, she stopped painting, becoming more of a mixed media artist, where she was unique as both a gallery artist and a filmmaker, with an ability to cross over between both worlds.  In the late 60’s she developed a fascination with social and political activism in art, often combining themes of patriotism with quilting, where one of her most famous artworks is a mural-sized quilt she created for Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in 1968, spelling out Trudeau’s political motto: “Reason over passion,” which also, interestingly enough, became the title for this film.  Wieland eventually divorced Snow, moved back to Canada in 1971 and became increasingly involved in cultural activism, including issues of ecology, feminism, and a Canadian resistance to American imperialism.  She maintained a studio in Toronto until she died of Alzheimer’s in 1998 at the age of 67, but in 1984, she was the first woman to be awarded the Order of Canada, and several years later in 1987 she became the first living Canadian woman artist to have a retrospective of her work exhibited at the National Art Gallery of Ontario. 

Wieland’s work became associated with the shift to the rigorous new way of seeing, the intense, almost philosophical speculations on cinema itself that came to be described as 'structural' film.  Playful wit and ironist that she is, Wieland in particular gives the lie to the impression of austerity that radiates from the label.  Her repetitive formats, loops, re-filming, long takes, and static camera are first at the service of the irreverent, nose-thumbing, Dadaist side of her artistic personality, strong on a sense of humour that can be ribald or teasingly ironic .... But a second side is simultaneously present: a side that demands that we re-look at objects, animals, landscapes with fresh, un-prejudiced eyes, and that gives us the rich colours and textures of so many of her images. 

None of these films can be watched without being constantly reminded that here is a filmmaker who isn’t just a filmmaker, but is also a painter, sculptor, collagist, quiltmaker, occasional political cartoonist, and artist working comfortably across a range of media and someone who from the late 60’s onwards saw herself as a ‘cultural activist.’ 

—Simon Field, free-lance writer on film and art, and Director of Cinema at the London Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1988 – 2004

Using Pierre Trudeau’s infamous motto as the title, and brief footage from the 1968 Liberal convention where he was nominated as Prime Minister (1968-79), ushering in an era of Trudeaumania, touting participatory democracy and a Just Society, Wieland’s feature-length experimental film is a silent meditation on landscape, covering the whole length of southern Canada from coast to coast as seen from the Trans-Canada Highway and Railway, becoming a rumination on all things Canadian, bookended by the Canadian national anthem, seen initially as words at the outset, where the director follows by mouthing the words, and played later in a symphonic rendition at the end, with constant recurring still images of the Canadian flag.  The film is a collaboration with fellow avant-garde filmmaker Hollis Frampton, who composed the constantly changing 537 algorithmically determined combinations of the letters in the title which are superimposed over the screen as subtitles.  This rather subversive means of altering its message suggests a society which allegedly strove to allow all individuals to participate in Canadian society may have omitted the social differences and needs of women, turning the slogan into a kind of doublespeak.  Wieland’s original intent may have been generated by a sense of loss, by the thought of losing what in great measure is Canada’s largest treasure, its immense, natural landscape, where the film might be an attempt to preserve an inherent beauty in what was a rapidly changing nation, creating a time capsule, much like a similar effect from various road movies of the same late 60’s era.  She uses hand-held cameras for endless tracking shots that go whizzing by, stopping occasionally for a quizzical look at a water tower or railway station with a town name affixed, where we see endless farmhouses and distant lakes and rivers, but also forests and mountain ranges eventually covered in snow, where the effect is to capture one giant, endless expanse, yet the pace of the film is constant motion, reminiscent of an early age of motion pictures where movement was generated by quickly turning the pages of a fixed image.  While there is a monotony of constant repetition, much like a metronome, the only sound heard is a beeping electronic tone, where this is a superimposed sense of order to counteract the randomness of the natural world that would otherwise be lost in silence while immersing the viewer into the enormity of the nation’s heartland, though there are occasional blips of sound that enter the picture unexpectedly, much like there are occasional pauses.  An example of art for art’s sake, the fixation on form, using stationary camera positions, takes precedence over the subject only in that the viewer is aware of the artificiality of a movie screening, yet the haunting aspect of the imagery, such as a lengthy tracking shot of the sun setting over the continually moving hills beyond, has a near subliminal effect of being etched into the viewer’s subconscious.         

Note

While there is a Canadian 5-disc DVD Box Set compilation of all of Joyce Wieland’s films, The Complete Works Of Joyce Wieland 1963-86, the 35mm print seen at the University of Chicago’s DOC Theater had deteriorated to a point where the colors had faded and were completely washed out from age, where there was little image left to see at all, but only faint outlines.  Much like Rossellini’s India: Matri Bhumi (1959), where the Cinémathèque Française was only able to partially restore the only existing copy of a badly faded film that had already begun to decompose, the resulting film remains badly faded, which may be typical of films from the late 60's, where most 35 mm prints from that era are mostly faded or saturated in pink/red unless they have been preserved.  In cases like this, the viewer has to imagine what it's supposed to look like without ever getting the chance to see “the real film,” where in this particular screening one does get a vague idea of the director’s intention.