Joyce Wieland

From May 14 to July 3, 2021

A major figure in Canadian contemporary art, Joyce Wieland (1930-1998) is a feminist artist whose work has involved a wide range of materials and media - drawing, painting, installation, film. Internationally recognized for her contribution to the development of experimental cinema, she created a powerful and engaged art form that remains influential today. It is this political commitment of Wieland's that this program highlights by bringing together video works whose singular sensitivity reveals, in its folds, an irony imbued with a symbolism filled with biting metaphors. Clearly, Wieland is a precursor of these works, stating that it is often in the absurd — in an inexhaustible flux — and the absence — in what is withdrawn from the reality given to see — that artists attest best of their times.

Programme 1 (78 min. 40 sec.)
— starts at noon and 3 pm

Pierre Vallieres (1972) — 32 min. 30 sec.

He delivered three essays, without stopping, except for reel change and camera breakdown: 1) Mont Laurier; 2) Quebec history and race; 3) women's liberation. Everything which happened is recorded on film. It was a one-shot affair, I either got him on film or I missed. What we see on film is the mouth of a revolutionary, extremely close, his lips, his teeth, his spittle, his tongue which rolls so beautifully through his French, and finally the reflections in his teeth of the window behind me. — Joyce Wieland

Solidarity (1973) — 10 min. 40 sec.

A film on the Dare strike of the early 1970s. Hundreds of feet and legs, milling, marching and picketing with the word “solidarity” superimposed on the screen. The soundtrack is an organizer's speech on the labour situation. Like her films Rat Life and Diet in North America, Pierre Vallieres and Reason Over Passion, Solidarity combines a political awareness, an aesthetic viewpoint and a sense of humour unique in Wieland's work.

Rat Life & Diet In North America (1968) — 16 min.

"I can tell you that Wieland's film holds. It may be about the best (or richest) political movie around. It's all about rebels (enacted by real rats) and police (enacted by real cats). After long suffering under the cats, the rats break out of prison and escape to Canada. There they take up organic gardening, with no DDT in the grass. It is a parable, a satire, an adventure movie, or you can call it pop art or any art you want — I find it one of the most original films made recently." — Jonas Mekas

"The film is witty, articulate, and a far cry from all the other cute animal humanism the cinema has sickened us with in the past. Nevertheless it is a vital extension of the aspect of her films that runs counter to the structural principle: ironic symbolism." — P. Adams Sitney, Film Culture

“Rat Life and Diet in North America proves that she's been looking long and affectionately at animal life, and is a sort of whimsical Evelyn Nesbit; never corny and creating with an intense female-ness." — Manny Farber, Artforum

Cat Food (1967) — 13 min. 30 sec.

"A cat eats its methodical way through a polymorphous fish. The projector devours the ribbon of film at the same rate, methodically. The lay of Grimnir mentions a wild boar whose magical flesh was nightly devoured by the heroes of Valhalla, and miraculously regenerated next morning in the kitchen. The fish in Wieland's film, and the miraculous flesh of the film itself, are reconstructed on the rewinds to be devoured again. Here is a dionysian metaphor, old as the West, of immense strength. Once we see that the fish is the protagonist of the action, this metaphor reverberates to incandescence in the mind." — Hollis Frampton

Handtinting (1967) — 6 min.

“Handtinting is the apt title of a film made from outtakes from a Job Corps documentary which features hand-tinted sections. The film is full of small movements and actions, gestures begun and never completed. Repeated images, sometimes in colour, sometimes not. A beautifully realized type of chamber-music film whose sum-total feeling is ritualistic.” — Robert Cowan, Take One

Programme 2 (83 min. 40 sec.)
— starts at 1:30 pm

Reason Over Passion (1969)

"Joyce Wieland's films are among the most endearing I have ever seen, making her point and sealing the issue in a womanly way without any concern for ragged edges. La Raison Avant la Passion is a whirlwind view of Canada with an anti-dialectical premise." — Douglas Pringle, ArtsCanada

"REASON OVER PASSION... is Joyce Wieland's major film so far. With its many eccentricities, it is a glyph of her artistic personality; a lyric vision tempered by an aggressive form and a visionary patriotism mixed with ironic self parody. It is a film to be seen many times." — P. Adams Sitney, Film Culture