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Joyce Wieland is likely the North American woman whose work is most often mentioned in passing in avant-garde film historiography. She remains, only a few years after her death in 1998, and twenty five years after her last major film, at best a footnote in the history of avant-garde film, and utterly unknown as a visual artist outside Canada; this, despite the fact that she was equally active as a filmmaker and a visual artist, completing 20 films in her lifetime and exhibiting continually until the onset of her illness with Alzheimer's in the late 1980s. Indeed she enjoyed the bittersweet distinction of being the first living woman to mount a solo exhibition at the National Gallery in Ottawa in 1971. Her greatest achievement was perhaps the completion of her narrative feature film, «The Far Shore» in 1975, during the earliest days of the Canadian feature film industry; it was however, in essence, her last film. Wieland developed an interest in film in the 1950s while still working as a graphic artist at a commercial animation house in Toronto. Following her move to New York City in 1962 with her then-husband, Michael Snow, she felt an increased affinity for the medium. Despite having been well established asan artist in Canada, having already had her first one-woman show in 1960, she nonetheless felt overwhelmed by the aggression of the burgeoning New York art world. Although she continued to produce non-time-based visual art throughout her nine year stay there, the work was never exhibited in New York. Instead she became a fixture of Jonas Mekas' Film-Makers Showcases, a connection that would continue until, in 1970, she proved not to be one of the two living women whose work was included in the Anthology Film Archives' «nuclear collection of the monuments of cinematic art.» [1]
was mentioned only in passing three times in David E. James' «Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties,» which, given the exemplary broadness and eclecticism of James' approach, would have been an ideal context for a more detailed consideration of her place within the arts of that decade. Ultimately Wieland is a figure both perplexing and paradoxically very much representative of several struggles going on within and between the art and film worlds in the 1960s.
symptomatic of the feminist slant to her work. Similarly, she investigated the «here and now» implied by the Canadian nationalism which was budding throughout the 1950s and raging like a (courteous) wildfire by the late 1960s. Northrop Frye has written that the conundrum of Canadian identity cannot be addressed through a simple examination of self, but rather that the Canadian sensibility has been «less perplexed by the question ‹Who am I?› than by some such riddle as ‹Where is here?›» [4] Wieland' s work takes up the task of specifying the place from which meaning emerges, in both an individual and a geographic sense. Finally, formally, her work was often rigorously sparse, obliquely pointing out the various repercussions of the filmic dispositif, yet was never without humour. It is these three features in combination, Wieland's focus on the specifics of the domestic sphere, her insistence on the difficulty of defining «where is here?» and her inclination towards a reductive aesthetic, have contributed to a body of work that, in its eclecticism, seems to continue to be largely illegible to critics and scholars alike. [5]
and space, on the significance of the place from which meaning emerges for the expression which results. The emotion of these works apparently confounds attempts to distil their discursive qualities. Their passion seems to encourage most observers to take a group of films at face value that palpably resist being reduced to simple exercises in political affirmation.
process of signification is key in both cases – but to radically different ends. Regarding Godard's «Demoiselles d'Avignon» Wollen writes, «it dislocates signifier from signified, asserting – as such a dislocation must – the primacy of the first, without in any way dissolving the second.« [9] But what are the means of such a dislocation? In how many ways may it be brought about? At the close of his text, Wollen yearns for a convergence between these ostensibly so different methodologies, never suspecting he may have overlooked it. Although Wollen underscores the fact that the division between the two avant-gardes is not simply drawn along the lines of the absence or presence of political commitment, it is clear that divergent relationships to the referential qualities of filmic images are at issue here – and by extension, their divergent potential to affect political enlightenment. What is lacking for Wollen is a film that combines an investigation of the filmic dispositif in both the most mechanical and the most social sense, and at the same time does not disdain the attention of a mass audience. I would like to offer the example of several of Wieland's films as a corrective to this divide, in thehope that it will be a first step towards more detailed analytical investigation of her oeuvre.
knowledge of past events to the image of the present, as if we were entering into a historical drama, turning the image of the film's present (which is identifiable as such) into a representation of the past? It was of course a not uncommon practice in the historical narrative films of the 1960s to embrace visual anachrony wholeheartedly. Without the benefit of historical knowledge, the superimposition in this case can also simply function as a signifier of nostalgia, of the eternal influence of the past on the imagination of the present. Of course we might also assume that 1933 refers to the address of the building in which the loop was shot. Or finally, is the text in this image simply an arbitrary combination of four Arabic numerals, which lead us down the garden path of conjecture? »1933» is among Wieland's most ‹structural› films. While it does not resist easy analysis as energetically as several other examples I'll cite here, it serves to point out Wieland's concern with the representability of the here and now in an unproblematic fashion and more specifically, to point out a strategy common to nearly all films discussed here: the juxtaposition of written language and image. In Wieland's work these two systems competefor attention, with each calling distinct processes into play. In the gap between the kinds of knowledge, or rather, the kinds of experience each may produce, is the suggestion that the filmic image always makes a visual but not necessarily an easily legible impression. This problematic is taken up explicitly in «Rat Life and Diet in North America,» from 1968, which is her first film to employ the political rhetoric of the day. «Rat Life and Diet in North America» In this 14-minute film, «Rat Life and Diet in North America» (1968), subtitles are superimposed over images of gerbils and cats in domestic settings ranging from a kitchen table to the screen of a window and the garden beyond. Inserted into the documentation of the banal adventure of a band of gerbils loose in the house is the familiar photograph of the dead Ché Guevara surrounded by uniformed men. What is most remarkable about this film is its (shameless) juxtaposition of a political tale with real-life referents, with images that could not be more quotidian, thus coupling a fictional narrative about American military aggression against Canada with the eternally tentative movements of gerbils. «Rat Life and Diet in North America»
is perplexing in that it ostensibly makes a mockery of its own political content: it is impossible to overlook the breech between the seriousness of the film's texts and the frivolity of its images, affected again by means of the orchestrated collision between image and written text. The film begins with an intertitle, «This film is against the corporate military structure of the global village,» a rhetorical gesture certainly not without precedent in the films of 1968, and is followed by titles which are superimposed over the images of the gerbils such as: «Political Prison«; «1968«; «Full Scale Rebellion is Carried Out«; and «Some of the bravest are lost forever» which juxtaposes a gerbil lying on its back with the photo of Che. Clearly, words and images are not redundant support for one another. Later, trite images of bucolic landscapes are contrasted in rapid-fire succession with the titles «Canada,» «Organic Gardening» and «No DDT being used» which themselves alternate and flash as if to advertise an attraction at a carnival, yet only carelessly promote their own content, sometimes even appearing upside down. These contrasts and conflicts between image and written text foreground the processes ofvisualization brought into play when one reads a text and, particularly when the text includes a proper name (such as «Canada»). By alternating between naïve illustration and outright contradiction, in their interaction with the film's textual intertitles and superimpositions, the film's images both illustrate and critique such simple associative pathways – common linkages which may well stand in the way of the complex perception needed for political change. I would argue however that the film does not efface its political content by questioning and poking fun at how that content is transmitted. Indeed, to quote Wollen (on Godard) once more, «it dislocates signifier from signified, asserting – as such a dislocation must – the primacy of the first, without in any way dissolving the second.» [10] Such a separation of word from image does not merely point out the meaning of language for the process of visualization: it insists as much on the haptic qualities of the image as on the graphic qualities of letters and numbers on the screen that would otherwise escape such a direct translation into signification.
consider the manner in which language is appropriated, situated and contextualized in the creation of subjects and thus of knowledge. But what is the status of the body in relation to discourse and how may one clarify the distinction between «discourse» and «experience?» Moreover, how may one still conceive of agency in this context? In her response to Scott entitled «History after the Linguistic Turn,» Kathleen Canning insists on the historical contingency of subjectivity but equally on the relevance of the material world for these processes. She follows Regenia Gagnier's suggestion «that examination of material culture (as the social space in which discourses are located) necessarily leads one to the body, that the body is located at a crossroads between material culture and subjectivity, and that bodily experiences of desire and deprivation shape subjectivity in important ways.» [17] Films are, of course, particularly suited to the task of locating the historical subject in its specificity in time and space, yet run the risk of making this contextualization seem self-evident. Indeed, how may the body, this point of juncture, this site of production that is itself produced, betranslated into representation without suggesting an essential relationship between visceral experience and subjectivity? In Wieland's case a strategy of visual reductio ad absurdum addresses this conundrum. While the majority of Wieland's films demonstrate an interest in the interaction between a body and its surroundings, both «Solidarity» and «Pierre Vallières» are unique in her oeuvre in that they focus explicitly on the relationship between experience and representation by employing radically selective framing techniques. When considered in the context of the talking head political documentary, or as a corrective to mainstream news, these two films represent an increasing localization of Wieland's perspective, a focus not unlike the developments going on contemporaneously within both the Newsreel collectives and the feminist documentary. However the formal characteristics of both of Wieland's films also suggest a discursive intervention. What do we understand from images that ostensibly document social events or statements given by individuals, that is, the images common to news broadcasts? The relationship between political statement (verbal or in
the form of a written text) and the body that undergoes experience in society tends to be taken for granted, and yet it functions as the visual guarantor of the authenticity and validity of the statement given. In Wieland's works the separation effected through the visual reductio ad absurdum denaturalizes the relationship between visceral experience and political (or other) discourse, suggesting, on the one hand that the words spoken are not equal to the experience had by the body and on the other, that the reception of the products of experience’s translation into language is equally fraught.
between racism and sexism. Subtitles translating Vallières’ Joual-tinged French into English are superimposed onto the image, pointing out the shortcomings and displacements of this means of making the unfamiliar familiar. Until the end of the last roll of film, which continues for some minutes after Vallières has finished speaking and pans over to the landscape visible out the window, the camera is exclusively focused on Vallières' lips and mouth in a tight close up. While the sensuous, viscerous quality of the mouth in these images is prominent, so too is its social significance: poor teeth suggest a childhood without privilege. [18] The manner in which lips, tongue and teeth interact to produce the language which is spoken on the film’s soundtrack and the presence of the ethnically-demarcated Québecois body behind that orifice are of course elements which are directly related to the experience of oppression narrated in the film's voiceover. Yet, through the radically reductive framing of the image, the relationship between these individual elements is denaturalized, poised on the verge of ridicule. The unusual proximity of the speaking subject of the film to the camera doesnot suggest an unbroken line connecting the body to the rhetoric that it produces, or to the undisturbed reception of that rhetoric by the viewer. Measured against the talking head aesthetic of conventional political documentary, Wieland’s unusual framing of her subject offers too great a proximity to the ‘source’ of the film’s content. The effect is disconcerting and has often been said to weaken the power of Vallières' words. [19] Further, the temporal structure of the film is defined by that of a roll of 16mm film stock, cutting Vallières off in the second reel and continuing after he has finished speaking in the third, privileging a representation of the constraints of 16mm filmmaking over the performance of the speaker. Thus once more a conflict is introduced between the film's aesthetic and its overtly political content, between signifier and signified.
This nationalist romance imagines a context for the mysterious death of the proto «Group of Seven» painter Tom Thompson by linking him romantically with a Québecois woman married to an English Canadian boor. In this dramatic feature passion is key: both the passion for another human and the passion for a landscape, a homeland. In the scene in question, which incidentally is often represented in stills for the film, the lovers speak across the table to one another, each holding a magnifying glass to the mouth. I imagine that the Francophone woman speaks French; the Anglophone man, English. It is impossible to say for sure, since no words can be heard, for it should come as no surprise that while the sources, the mouths and the bodies, of this passionate exchange are emphasized, we never learn what it is that they are saying.