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March
10 - March 13, 2010
Directors
in Focus
Joyce
Wieland and Friends
I
think being an artist is about following your own way, and having
the courage to be who you are and what you are. To have self-knowledge...
that deep, dark discovery of self, part of which is maturing,
part of which is creating wholeness. – Joyce Wieland
In
conjunction with Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists,
1958 – 1968 at the University of
the Arts (1/22/10 – 3/14/10), Film @ International House celebrates
artist/filmmaker Joyce Wieland with a long overdue retrospective
of her cinematic oeuvre. Wieland was one of Canada’s
most influential woman artists and produced works in a variety
of media, including sculptures, quilts, tapestries, paintings
and films, all celebrating her joy for life, as well as reflecting
her feminist leanings and passion for her beloved country.
A
self-described "cultural activist," she is best known
for celebrating Canadian national identity and bringing forward
feminist issues within the predominantly male art culture of
the time. Concern with the protection of Canadian confederation
and gender issues repeatedly surfaced in her work. Wieland returned
to drawing and painting landscapes and figurative imagery in
the ’80s, her production waning in the '90s. Made
an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1982, Wieland died in 1998
from Alzheimer’s Disease.
Wednesday,
March 10, 2010
Shorts
Program I
Patriotism
1
dir.
Joyce Wieland, US/Canada, 1964, 16mm, 4 mins, color, sound
Wieland's
kinetic romp first casts filmmaker David Shackman as an overexposed
sleeper dogged by a patriotic march of "tube steaks,"
then later refigures him as our most familiar icon of freedom.
This pixilated short about hot dogs is the latest of Wieland's
early film works to be restored to circulation.
Patriotism
2
dir.
Joyce Wieland, US/Canada, 1965, 16mm, 3 mins, color, sound
A
portrait of Dave Shackman with the American flag. The ending
is a stop-motion animation of a set table with food moving and
swirling and finally gathering together in a ball. The animation
sequence seems to foreshadow Shackman’s early death. He passed
away shortly after the film was made.
Pierre
Vallieres
dir.
Joyce Wieland, US/Canada, 1972, 16mm, 33 mins, color, French
w/ English subtitles
Quebec
journalist and revolutionary Pierre Vallières was the intellectual
leader of the Front de liberation du Quebec (FLQ) . Vallières
called for armed struggle and in 1970, during the October Crisis,
the FLQ kidnapped and murdered the Quebec Vice-Premier, Pierre
Laporte. The following year, Vallieres renounced violence as
a means to achieve Quebec independence. "Pierre Vallieres
is one of the most
effective political films I've seen... Joyce Wieland concentrates
on the speaker's voice; she presents Pierre Vallières’s
voice in close-up, so
that nothing is hidden. And the truth of the voice, the sound
of the voice, the nuances of the voice, its vibrations, and
its colors merge so totally with what is being said that no
other images are needed to make the point." - Jonas Mekas
La
Raison Avant La Passion
dir.
Joyce Wieland, US/Canada, 1969, 16mm, 80 mins, color, sound
"This
film is about the pain and joy of living in a very large space:
in fact, in a continent. It is painful, because such an experience
distends the mind; it seems too large for passionate reason
to contain. It is joyous, because 'true patriot love,' a reasonable
passion, can contain it, after all. But what is remarkable,
for me, is that all its urgency is lucidly caught, bound as
it were chemically, in the substance of film itself, requiring
no exterior argument." - Hollis Frampton
Thursday,
March 11, 2010
Shorts
Program II
Water
Sark
dir.
Joyce Wieland, US/Canada, 1965, 16mm, 14 mins, color, sound
"I
decided to make a film at my kitchen table. There is nothing
like knowing my table. The high art of the housewife. You take
prisms, glass, lights and myself to it… Water Sark
is a film sculpture, drawing being made while you wait."
- Joyce Wieland
Larry’s
Recent Behaviour
dir.
Joyce Wieland, US/Canada, 1963, 16mm, 17 mins, color
One
of Joyce Wieland's earliest works, shot in 8mm and blown-up
to 16mm, Larry’s Recent Behaviour was described by
Simon Field (then Director of
the International Film Festival Rotterdam) as
an "irreverent and willfully juvenile examination"
of a nasty habit that Larry has recently acquired.
Peggy’s
Blue Skylight
dir.
Joyce Wieland, US/Canada, 1965, 16mm, 11 mins, color, sound
Filmmed
in Joyce Wieland and Michael Snow's loft in New York, the film
covers a day of friends visiting, writing and drawing from noon
of one day to dawn the next. Soundtrack by pianist Paul Bley.
1933
dir.
Joyce Wieland, US/Canada, 1967, 16mm, 4 mins, color, sound
"1933.
The year? The number? The title? Was it (the film) made then?
It's a memory! (i.e. a Film ). No, it's many memories. It's
so sad and funny: the departed, departing people, cars, street!
It hurries, it's gone, it's back! It's the only glimpse we have
but we can have it again. The film (of 1933?) was made in 1967.
You find out, if you didn't already know, how naming tints pure
vision." - Michael Snow
Barbara's
Blindness
dir.
Joyce Wieland, US/Canada, 1967, 16mm, 17 mins, b/w, sound
"There
is no one named Barbara to be found; a pair of mysterious blind-person's
hands (looking suspiciously like Wieland's) make only one cameo
appearance to 'read' us the title; yet these seemingly incongruous
elements provide the perfect introduction to the ironic humor
of the film itself. The main source of the film seems to be
an old grade-school morality movie on the appreciation of eyesight,
starring golden-haired Mary, who finds herself temporarily blind,
and a leaden-voiced narrator, who finds himself our unwitting
straight-man. The filmmakers
re-edited
this curiosity and intercut it with other stock footage of disasters,
agricultural techniques, and monster movies, to create a very
different object lesson on the nature of vision." – B Ruby
Rich
Catfood
dir.
Joyce Wieland, US/Canada, 1968, 16mm, 13 mins, color, sound
"In
Catfood Wieland shows a cat devouring fish after fish
for some ten minutes. There seems to be no repetition of shots,
but the imagery is so consistent throughout--shot of the fish,
the cat eating, his paw clawing, another fish, the cat eating,
etc.--that it is just possible the shots are recurrent. There
is no question that Wieland has a unique talent." - P Adams
Sitney, Film Culture
Dripping
Water
dir.
Joyce Wieland, US/ Canada, 1969, 16mm, 11 mins, b/w, sound
"I
can imagine only St Francis looking at a water plate and water
dripping so lovingly, so respectfully, so serenely. The usual
reaction is: 'Oh what is it anyhow? Just a plate of water dripping.'
But that is a snob remark. The remark has no love for the world,
for anything. [Michael] Snow and Wieland's film uplifts the
object, and leaves the viewer with a finer attitude toward the
world around him, it opens his eyes to the phenomenal world.
And how can you love people if you don't love water, stone,
grass." - Jonas Mekas, The New York Times
Hand
Tinting
dir.
Joyce Wieland, US/Canada, 1967, 16mm, 6 mins, color
"Hand
Tinting is the apt title of another short film (made from
cut outs 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 color,
sometimes not, a beautifully realized type of chamber-music
film whose sum-total feeling is ritualistic." - Robert
Cowan, Take One
Rat
Life and Diet In North America
dir.
Joyce Wieland, US/Canada, 1968, 16mm, 16 mins, color, sound
"I
can tell you what 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
a long suffering under the cats, the rats break out of the prison
(in a full scale rebellion) 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
Sailboat
dir.
Joyce Wieland, US/Canada, 1967, 16mm, 3 mins, color, sound
“This
little sailboat film will sail right through your gate and into
your heart. Sailboat has the simplicity of a child's
drawing. A toy-like image of a sailboat sails, without interruption,
on the water, to the sound of roaring waves, which seem to underline
the image to the point of exaggeration, somewhat in the way
a child might draw a picture of water and write word-sounds
on it to make it as emphatic as possible. ...Joyce Wieland makes
a very special kind of film. The ame sense of humor, tenderness
and feeling for the more humble details of life that is present
in her paintings and plastic constructions are given further
dimensions in her films. There is somewhat of a sense of sadness
and nostalgia in all her work, ...a sense of lost innocence."
- Robert Cowan
Friday,
March 12, 2010
The
Far Shore
dir.
Joyce Wieland, Canada, 1976, 16mm, 105 mins, color
Set
in 1918 Ontario, The Far Shore follows Eulalie, a
Quebecoise, marries a Toronto engineer but finds life with him
oppressive. She falls in love with Tom, a painter who is an
acquaintance of her husband's and, with him, escapes briefly
to Northern Ontario before they are hunted down by her jealous
husband.
"For something like two decades, Joyce Wieland—the Toronto
painter, filmmaker, quiltmaker and lay ecologist—has been creating
an individual sensibility and then displaying it, piece by piece,
in the various art forms that have suited her purposes. In The
Far Shore , her feature film, she articulates that sensibility
in detail for the first time... [the film] has energy, ambition,
vision and a marvelously confident sense of itself." -
Marshall Delaney
preceded
by
Birds
at Sunrise
dir.
Joyce Wieland, Canada, 1985, 16mm, 10 mins, color
"The
film was originally photographed in 1972. Birds from my window
were filmed during the winter, through to the spring, with the
early morning light. I became caught up in their frozen world
and their ability to survive the bitter cold. I welcomed their
chirps and their songs which offered life and hope for spring.
"In 1984 I was part of a cultural exchange between Canada
and Israel. During my visit, my unfinished movie came to mind.
A connection was established in my mind: …the suffering of the
birds became, in a sense, symbolic of the Jews and their survival
through suffering. The film begins with the reading in Hebrew
of the 23rd Psalm. This lays the spiritual ground to the film.
I dedicate this film to Ayala."– Joyce Wieland
Solidarity
dir.
Joyce Wieland, US/Canada, 1973, 16mm, 11 mins, color, sound
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 labor 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 humor unique
in Wieland's work.
Saturday,
March 13, 2010
Friends
Program
Artist
on Fire: Joyce Wieland
dir.
Kay Armatage, Canada, 1987, 16mm, 54 mins, color
A
pioneer of feminist avant-garde cinema, Joyce Wieland has explored
the crux of nationalism, feminine sexuality and ecology for
more than thirty years in films such as her influential Rat
Life and Diet and Reason Over Passion. This richly
suggestive portrait surveys Wieland's involvement in structural
filmmaking with Michael Snow and Hollis Frampton in the 1960s
and her reinvention of women's crafts in her artwork.
Breakfast
dir.
Michael Snow, US/Canada, 1976, 16mm, 15 min, color, sound
"Shot
in 1972 and shelved until 1976, when sound and editing problems
were solved. All the varied and unusual motions visible on the
screen are the result of a single camera movement. [Like Michael
Snow’s] Wavelength before breakfast. A continuous
zoom traverses the space of a breakfast table, serving as a
grand metaphor for indigestion." - Deke Dusinberre
To
Lavoisier, Who Died in the Reign of Terror
dir.
Michael Snow, US/Canada, 1991, 16mm, 52min, color, sound
Like
the work of pioneering French Chemist Antoine Lavoisier, the
film is situated between modern chemistry and alchemy. The scenes
in the film are all "staged" but shot on different
stock and chemically modified. This film is a dynamic interaction
of "abstract" and "realist" form, a drama
of abstraction and "theatrical" realism. Image collaboration
by Carl Brown.
Saturday,
March 13, 2010
Hollis
Frampton
A
& B in Ontario
dir.
Joyce Wieland and Hollis Frampton, US/Canada, 1984, 16mm, 16
mins, b/w, sound
"Hollis
and I came back to Toronto on holiday in the summer of '67.
We were staying at a friend's house. We worked our way through
the city and eventually made it to the island. We followed each
other around. We enjoyed ourselves. We said we were going to
make a film about each other - and we did." - Joyce Wieland
A
& B in Ontario was completed eighteen years after the
original material was shot. After Frampton's death, the film
was assembled by Wieland into a cinematic dialogue in which
the collaborators (in the spirit of the '60s) shoot each other
with cameras.
Zorns
Lemma
dir.
Hollis Frampton, US, 1970, 16mm, 60 mins, color, sound
"[Frampton’s]
most important work to date, and the most original new work
of cinema I have seen since Brakhage's Scenes From Under
Childhood: Part IV. [The] film is an exercise in mathematical
logic in cinema. Or is it a mechanical logic? …It's about alphabet.
It's about the unities of similarities. It's about sameness
in a confusion. It's about logic in chance. It’s about structure
and logic. It's about rhythm. Ah, what a difference between
Zorns Lemma and all the 'serious' commercial movies that I occasionally
praise!" - Jonas Mekas, Village Voice
Snowblind
dir.
Hollis Frampton, US, 1968, 16mm, 5 mins, b/w, silent
An
homage to Michael Snow's environmental sculpture Blind. The
film proposes analogies, in imitation of three historic montage
styles, for three perceptual modes mimed by that work.
Maxwell's
Demon
dir.
Hollis Frampton, US, 1968, 16mm, 4 mins, color, sound
An
homage to the physicist James Clerk-Maxwell, father of thermodynamics
and analytic color theory. His famous Demon, mythic and microscopic,
is a perfectly imaginary being who deals entirely in pure energy.
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