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| Directed by Joyce Wieland |
| Canada, 1969 (experimental, 82 minutes, colour / black and white, English) |
| Also known as "Reason over Passion" |
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| Image: © Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre |
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Film Description: "[Reason over Passion is] a feature-length avant-garde film which brackets a section of treated and rephotographed footage of Pierre Elliott Trudeau at the 1968 Liberal convention with a series of hand-held tracking shots of the Canadian landscape from coast to coast, punctuated throughout by electronic beeps on the soundtrack and overlaid with multiple anagrams of the words 'reason over passion' (Trudeau's famous phrase) as superimposed subtitles." -- Kay Armatage (source) |
| Film Credits (partial): | |
| Cinematography: | Joyce Wieland |
| Film Editing: | Joyce Wieland |
| Production Company: | Corrective Films |
"At the time I photographed it [La raison avant la passion] (1967), I was in a panic; an ecological, spiritual panic about this country. [...] I was thinking about The Group of Seven and that certain artistic records have to be made at certain times. Just look what has happened to many of the places they sketched. There are old shoes and hamburger buns in those lakes. That country inspired some of the greatest landscapes painted in this world. I photographed the whole length of southern Canada to preserve it in my own way, with my own vision of it. I felt very strongly—very passionately. Yet, the total result of the finished film is a nostalgic, sad feeling about the landscape."
-- Joyce Wieland
(source)
"Some of the [Canadian] students really liked [Reason over Passion]. People in New York or Canada wonder why I made such a film. But Canadians were really overwhelmed. It was like a fantastic compliment given to them. In New York, on the other hand, they might accuse me of being a rightist for feeling that way about my country. Maybe some of them didn't see the irony. People have hissed when Trudeau's statement, 'Reason over passion; that is the theme of all my writing' comes on and the applause begins, because they don't understand that there is an irony in that. People here [in New York] just don't believe and say that it must be a propaganda film."
-- Joyce Wieland
(source)
"Reason Over Passion was not merely a suite of works that marked the maturation of Joyce Wieland's nationalism. It was the summit of her nationalism, a grand gesture resulting from years abroad, marking home as her primary concern, as the dwindling apocalyptic days of the 1960s had left her wondering if there would even be a country to return home to. She revealed that home in its vastness, in a premature mourning of the land."
-- Stephen Broomer
(source)
"At the Underground Festival that ran night and day in late December at the Elgin Theater, [Michael] Snow's films were pure reflective intelligence within an exacting, hard-nosed compositional system. The direct opposite is a random, hit-and-miss quality in Joyce Wieland's La Raison Avant La Passion, a veritable pasture of expansive landscape imagery. The film is divided into three sections, a green section of the East Coast, then a middle which is an ode to Trudeau (mostly Canadian flags and hot orange-red-pink face shots) and lastly an extraordinary white endlessness of snowscape."
-- Manny Farber
(source)
"Part of what [Joyce] Wieland considered her ongoing role of feminizing national symbols, Reason Over Passion is an experimental nationalist road film (an experiment in nationalisms) cross-cutting idealized signifiers for Canada—the national flag, images of Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau—with coast-to-coast shots of regional landscapes."
-- Christopher Gittings
(source)
"La Raison Avant La Passion [...] was the festival's most difficult film [First Festival of Women's Films, Philadelphia, June 1972]. Halfway through its 80 minutes, people began to leave. In this, the second part of a political trilogy, [Joyce Wieland's] camera catches the land-flow of Canada across the deep space of the country, through car, train and plane windows, at different times of day and varying exposures. The illusion of depth and space is constantly alerted by the flat, computerized permutations of the phrase, (Trudeau's words,) 'reason over passion', flashing over the screen in 537 different forms. The bold course of her journey, with emblems as guides, using different kinds of time to change rhythms, (body-time, film-speed, train-time, etc.) as well as the obvious fact that the 'passion' of trees, mountains, and huge-ness is wild enough to conquer all 'reason' make this a long, lyric contradiction of Trudeau's words, totally radical in form. In structure and treatment, the film differs so greatly from the dull rhythms of the media in our daily lives, that the audience was confused, bored, and jolted. Yet most people who saw it can't forget it, and a small minority made a point of letting me know they found it complex, fascinating, and endlessly interesting."
-- Alexandra Grilikhes
(source)
"Joyce Wieland has been bouncing back and forth between Ottawa, Montreal and here [Toronto] lately, showing her latest film [La raison avant la passion] to selected audiences, including about 450 people at the National Arts Centre. In all, about 1,000 people have seen it so far, and that's not enough for it is one of those things that should be around all the time, like a public monument."
-- Barrie Hale
(source)
"In the opening sequence of her film Reason over Passion [...], Wieland includes a written version of the words to O Canada immediately followed by a close-up of the lower half of her face silently mouthing the words to the national anthem. This firmly establishes Wieland as author of this alternative, gendered discourse of nation, literally claiming and re-presenting her own version of the anthem as intimately bound to the bodily and sensorial."
-- Kristy A. Holmes-Moss
(source)
"[La raison avant la passion's] ambiguous approach to producing patriotism surely must result in part from its use of a post-Pop art approach to ends entirely different from those one usually associates with the earlier movement. Wieland has been described as post-Warhol, but one cannot imagine a more different artistic personality in terms of themes and intent. Where Pop art imagery is so often used to disparage or satirize, Wieland's is far more positive."
-- George Lellis
(source)
"From the first shots of Cape Breton beaches where the rolling surf is something right side up and sometimes upside down, and most important you are not sure which; till the final climatic descent from the Rockies into Vancouver to the stationary giant ocean-going liner, photographed as if it were a huge postcard; Joyce Wieland's film [La raison avant la passion] puts us inside a Rauschenberg in motion with the warping beat of a Noland."
-- Ross Mendes
(source)
"The film takes a statement from then-Prime Minister of Canada Pierre Trudeau ('Reason over passion, that is the theme of all of my writings') as its cohering element, as its caveat about devaluing assumptions and emotions in the search for (supposed) rationality and truth. [...] Trudeau's statement is rendered incoherent, literally, by the seemingly random scrambling of the letters of the alphabet that make up his original utterance and, metaphorically, in what (if anything) this statement says about Canada. In so doing, Wieland makes a powerful statement about what becomes of passion in the face of obsessive ordering and rationality; it loses meaning, it loses sense."
-- James Missen
(source)
"Is this [La raison avant la passion] a good film? Or interesting? Miss Wieland calls it a 'corrective' film, a passive accumulation of images. For anyone who's bored by the topography of the wilderness, its potential as a bank for images [...], and who is interested in the speculations of Mr. Trudeau in the political arena, it most certainly will be dull. But for anyone whose sense of Canada comes from the land itself, the film will be a welcome relief from the divisive effects of media politics."
-- Douglas Pringle
(source)
"Canadian filmmaker, Joyce [Wieland] came to York [University] Monday to show and discuss one of her films, Reason Over Passion, as part of the women's film festival at York this week [Women Directors and Their Films, March 5-9, 1973]. [...] The audience had mixed reactions to the film. They ranged from the feeling it was a fine film artistically and politically and that much more needed to be done with landscape to a feeling of anger and insult that here was no clear content, political or otherwise."
-- Ruth Shamai
(source)
"Obviously influenced by the work of her husband, painter Mike Snow, Mrs. Wieland [Joyce Wieland] has sought for and achieved an unusual effect. [...] By having her camera jiggle continuously, take pictures at an almost unvarying rate, follow endless miles of uninterrupted landscape, Mrs. Snow [Joyce Wieland] ends up by lulling the viewer completely, creating a feeling of utter, hopeless, unchanging futility. Her picture is in three parts. The first part explores green—all the shades and permutations of green. In the last part it minutely scrutinizes all the possible shades of white. Both sections, through their relentless restlessness, create a feeling of unbearable ennui in the viewer."
-- Jacob Siskind
(source)
"[Joyce Wieland's] latest film, Reason over Passion (1969) is her strongest. A description of the film's plan, its argument, suggests an epic form; for she has attempted no less than to cross Canada from ocean to ocean, filming. In the middle of it all, a portrait of [Pierre] Trudeau, the Prime Minister (the title is a phrase from one of his speeches), interrupts the journey. His image has the same reduction to the granular as the optical or the off-the-screen printings of Gehr, Jacobs, and others. The word 'epic' would not apply to the moment by moment experience of the film, which is one of aggressive elongation punctuated by a mild sadness. She does not glorify the land, but seems to mourn for it."
-- P. Adams Sitney
(source)
"The magnificence of the film [La raison avant la passion] lies in its imagery: a moving excursion across Canada from east to west. Shots of the setting sun running along the horizon, a train emerging from a tunnel into a snowscape burned out on the film stock, a harbour seen through the tilted camera. These images incarnate the epic spirit of the film which with all its contradictions (of form and image, sound and picture) is extravagantly ambitious and elevated. Yet one feels more sadness than grandeur at the passing landscapes, the flashing animations of the Canadian flag, and the grainy slowed down images of Trudeau. At the end we have seen an ecological dirge, not a poem of becoming so much as of what might have been."
-- P. Adams Sitney
(source)
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