Joyce Wieland wrote:
I wanted to make a self-sufficient film, photographing myself in those mirrors on the table with all that water and prisms, and glasses and cups. In a way I was saying I can do a film that needs no people, no outside world, no glamour, no money, and do it all in the kitchen.Read More »
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An irreverent and wilfully juvenile examination of a nasty habit that Larry has recently acquired.Read More »
Constructed from found and stock footage, the short is a meditation on vision and adversity, drawing humour and pathos from a moralising educational film.Read More »
Rat Life and Diet in North America is a short film that tells a story about rats (actually pet gerbils) held as political prisoners in the United States (their jailer a cat), who make a heroic escape to Canada. Although this narrative is recounted through wryly worded intertitles, Wieland’s film nonetheless conveys a sense of menace and urgency. For these protagonists “Canada” becomes a utopian destination, promising abundance, pleasure, and peace. The film was created in 1968, a time of international student protests against the military and capitalist establishments, the rise of the New Left, and worldwide demonstrations against the Vietnam War; many young American men were fleeing to Canada to avoid being drafted into the military.Read More »
Standard Time is 8 minutes and feels, hypnotically, like a time-less segment fragment of life.(Life-physical movement in a space/time enclosure). The camera swivels (pans) left to right, over and over again, then tilts, up and down, over and over again establishing movement as such as the given conditions of perception and existence. This suspended tension of being holds for both the cameraman and the spaces/walls/objects/(people?)…The film establishes each viewer’s autonomous sense of self. The bombarding impulses, through the ‘repeated’ pans/tilts, permit (for each viewer, each time) different moments of reality to become relevant, exciting etc. The speed at which the camera sees the given visually creates frustration at not being able to hold (the) experience, to pattern it in a conventional manner. Michael Snow’s film activates one’s internal mechanisms for grasping, (idiosyncratically, in time), the substances one is faced with, a negates objective experience once and for all. In terms of the politics of experience and human consciousness, few films could be less fascist. Standard Time is also a beautiful ‘8’ minutes. – Peter Gidal.Read More »
Cat Food
Canada / 13:30 min. / 1967
sound / color
“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 CultureRead More »