Birds at Sunrise 1985, 10 min
‘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 – so that 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
Cat Food 1968, 13 min
‘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
Sailboat 1967, 3 min
‘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 seems 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. The little image is interrupted at one point by a huge shoulder appearing briefly in the left-hand corner.’ Robert Cowan, Take One
‘This little Sailboat film will sail right through your gate and into your heart.’ Joyce Wieland
‘A day at the Beach, at the Sea, at the Sky and at the Sailboats.’ Michael Snow
A & B in Ontario 1984, 16 min
‘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 18 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 sixties) shoot each other with cameras.
Dripping Water 1969, 12 min
‘You see nothing but a white, crystal white plate, and water dripping into the plate, from the ceiling, from high, and you hear the sound of the water dripping. The film is ten minutes long. 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. That remark has no love for the world, for anything. Snow and Wieland’s film uplifts the object, and leaves the viewer with a finer attitude toward the world around him; it can open his eyes to the phenomenal world. And how can you love people if you don’t love water, stone, glass?’ Jonas Mekas, New York Times, 1969
1933 1967, 4 min
‘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, streets! It hurries, it’s gone, it’s back! the film (of 1933?) was made in 1967. You find out, if you don't already know, how naming tints pure vision.’ Michael Snow
‘The repeated images are such that they appear to be different each time; to be expanding. 1933 has a machine-mechanical doll rhythmic-like structure.’ Robert Cowan, Take One
Programme duration 59 min
Tate Modern Starr Auditorium
£5 (£4 concessions), booking recommended
Book tickets online
or call 020 7887 8888
Saturday 21st January, 2 – 5pm
Passion Over Reason: A Joyce Wieland Study Day
The Canadian painter and filmmaker Joyce Wieland is a significant figure in the history of artists’ filmmaking. Closely involved with the Structural film movement in New York in the late 1960s, she collaborated with Hollis Frampton, and even makes an appearance in Wavelength, the film by her then husband Michael Snow, which has come to define the movement.
However, Wieland’s association to these Structural film heavyweights has often eclipsed her own very important contribution to avant-garde film form. Her multi-faceted film practice spans three decades, bringing a lyricism and humour
to Structural practice, whilst also displaying a committed engagement to political as well as perceptual and aesthetic questions.
This one-day workshop compliments Tate Modern’s survey of Joyce Wieland’s unique film practice, by focusing on some of the key concerns and contexts which have influenced her filmmaking: from national identity to female subjectivity. It offers an opportunity to view and discuss a selection of her films
alongside those of her peers, and to consider her legacy for further generations of artist filmmakers. As Kirsty A Jones suggests, ‘it’s important to not only examine Wieland’s artistic production, but to think about the different ways in which her art has been “archived” and subsequently understood over time.’
(ww.cfmdc.org/sites/default/files/Wieland-StudyGuide-Intro.pdf)
The workshop runs from 2-5pm on Saturday 21st January at LUX and will be led by Lucy Reynolds, and introduced by Lauren Howes, Director of the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, who will be present to discuss Wieland’s importance to Canadian art.
£5, book a place go to http://www.wegottickets.com/event/150585
Saturday 21 January 2012, 19.00
Joyce Wieland Season
Programme 2
Patriotism 1 1964, 4 min
Wieland's kinetic romp casts David Shackman as an overexposed sleeper dogged by a patriotic march of tube steaks that finally refigures him as our most familiar icon of freedom. This pixillated short about hot dogs is the latest of Wieland’s early film works to be restored to circulation.
Rat Life and 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, Art Forum
Patriotism 2 1965, 3 min
In a way 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. Looking back at the film, the animation sequence seems to foreshadow Dave Shackman’s early death. He died shortly after the film was made.
Handtinting 1967, 6 min
‘Handtinting is the apt title of a film made from out takes 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
Barbara's Blindness, 1965, 6 min 15
‘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 humour 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
Solidarity, 1973, 10 min 15
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.
Water Sark, 1966, 13 min 30
‘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. The Housewife is High. Water Sark is a film sculpture, being made while you wait.’ Joyce Wieland
Programme duration 59 min
Tate Modern Starr Auditorium
£5 (£4 concessions), booking recommended
Book tickets online
or call 020 7887 8888
Sunday 22 January 2012, 16.00
Joyce Wieland Season
Reason Over
Passion
Reason Over Passion (La raison avant la passion), 1968–9, 80 minReason over Passion is one of Joyce Wieland’s most renowned experimental films – a cross-country travelogue, political satire, modernist experiment – which embodies many of the themes recurrent in her rich, diverse and extensive oeuvre. It was inspired by a speech given by then Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, in which the phrase ‘reason over passion’ was meant to be a strategic goal for Canada’s future and the possibility of unity between the French and the English. To Joyce Wieland, however, as a woman, as an artist (who worked with textiles undervalued as women’s craft not high art), and as a passionate Canadian nationalist, ‘Passion over Reason’ described more of her own approach to art and life.
Tate Modern Starr Auditorium
£5 (£4 concessions), booking recommended
Book tickets online
or call 020 7887 8888
Inger Lise Hansen
