Joyce Wieland

Jonas Mekas wrote:
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?Read More »

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Rat Life and Diet in North America is a Canadian short film, directed by Joyce Wieland and released in 1968. A satirical allegory for the political climate of the 1960s, the film centres on a group of gerbils who are being held as political prisoners by a cat, until eventually escaping to Canada and taking up organic farming.Read More »

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Reason 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.Read More »

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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.Read More »

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Filmed 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 day.Read More »

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Depicts an army of phallic, bun-clad wieners marching on a vulnerable sleeping white male body, naked save for a sheet.Read More »

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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 sixties) shoot each other with cameras.Read More »

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Set in 1918 Ontario, The Far Shore employs both melodramatic conventions and experimental formal strategies to tell the tale of Eulalie, a Quebecoise woman, and her love affair with Tom McLeod (a thinly veiled fictionalization of Canadian painter Tom Thomson).Read More »

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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.Read More »