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.
