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| Directed by Joyce Wieland |
| Canada, 1968 (experimental, 16 minutes, colour) |
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| Image: © Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre |
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Film Description: "The 'rats' in the film, who are actually gerbils [...] escape from their cage and evade those who held them prisoners, the cats. On their way they have many adventures, including breaking into the house of a millionaire and stuffing themselves with rich foods from his table. They arrive in Canada in time for cherry season and have a cherry festival and celebrate with a flower ceremony as well. There they will live in peace and grow their own organic vegetables." -- Jane Lind (source)
Film Description [in French] : |
"I was sick of all these little groups, like little priesthoods of understanding, groups that believed in one theory or another, and I found things drying up towards the late sixties. I also had been reading what the nationalist writers had been writing and I had been reading my own history again and had been very much involved with American history and various demonstrations and all kinds of political work there. Finally, when I took all this into consideration, I realized that the statistics looked terrible in terms of Canada surviving as a nation. I began to absorb that into my work and I did Rat Life and Diet in North America and then started the quilted works."
-- Joyce Wieland
(source)
"I shot six times the amount of film I needed [for Rat Life and Diet in North America]. I had a magnifying lens on the end of the camera but one moment I'd be right up close, and the next they'd be gone. The rats were a gift of Graham Ferguson, who did the film on the Polar Regions at Expo. They are two couples, and each has a lifetime mate. They have great personalities; they're very haunted characters, like the political radicals in the United States."
-- Joyce Wieland
(source)
"My political interests became evident in my film works about five years ago, when I became anxious about Canada and the American takeover. The interest showed itself first in the art works and then went over into the film works and influenced them. Rat Life and Diet in North America is the first film I made that involved Canada as a subject and had any political reference. It is about coming back to Canada."
-- Joyce Wieland
(source)
"But what is actually happening in the so-called New American Cinema? According to Joyce Wieland, a Toronto artist who moved to New York to make experimental films, the underground is moving closer to commercial movies, and the commercial movies are taking on an underground flavour. Rat Life and Rat Diet, a 13-minute film by Miss Wieland makes it easy to see what she means. The film is at once underground (in its attitudes, technique and anti-establishment individualism) and not underground (in the sense that it could probably find acceptance with a fairly commercial, albeit art-house, audience)."
-- Martin Knelman
(source)
"In Rat Life and Diet in North America [Joyce Wieland] links the technological imperative with the imperialist ambitions of the American Empire, a society of death the rats (played by gerbils) must flee to find happiness in organic gardening on the Canadian side of the border."
-- Brenda Longfellow
(source)
"In 1969, Rat Life and Diet in North America (14 min.) became an underground success, though some of the New York group may have thought it un-hip. [Joyce] Wieland shot her rats (gerbils) for six months, putting different things in their glass cages for each sequence. Finally, after putting them in the sink in an inch of water, she 'began to see what the film was about ... a story of revolution and escape.'"
-- Hugo McPherson
(source)
"At the University of Kansas, I saw Joyce Wieland's Rat Life and Diet in North America for the eighth time, and it holds. [...] It may be the best (or richest) political movie around. It's all about rebels (enacted by real rats) and police (enacted by real cats). After a long suffering under the cats, the rats break out of the prison (in a full scale rebellion) 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
(source)
"A structural narrative film in the self-styled guise of an animal parable like those by Beatrix Potter (author of Peter Rabbit tales), [Rat Life and Diet in North America] reinforces [Joyce] Wieland's senses of fixed, flat space, expressive textures, and the intricacy and grace of repetitive details, tiny movements and gestures. Sequences showing gerbils running loose on a supper table after the evening meal or eating cherries draw out sensuous colors and textures of food, dishes, and cloth similar to Dutch still life paintings or the more recent photorealist still lives of Audrey Flack."
-- Lauren Rabinovitz
(source)
"The rodent-heroes [in Rat Life and Diet in North America] are revolutionaries and stand-in for Vietnam War resisters, who escape from captivity in the United States and successfully cross the border into Canada—which is now a countercultural dream-come-true, allowing the animals to bliss out amid fruit and flowers accompanied by a groovy soundtrack. With this coherent storyline and commitment to a political cause, [Joyce] Wieland diverges from the antinarrative stance taken by devotees of the Structural Film movement."
-- Johanne Sloan
(source)
"When [Joyce] Wieland claimed she 'couldn't make aesthetic statements in New York
any more,' this was not because other artists in the U.S. did not share her political views [...]. Circa 1971, it seemed that politicized artists in
the U.S. had no choice, however, but to make art that was critical, angry, and oppositional. In Canada, Wieland foresaw the possibility of making art that was equally politically-engaged, yet profoundly different because it was affirmative and utopian, and because it was participating in a larger project to reinvent the nation. Rat Life and Diet in North America announced the emergence of a different kind of political art."
-- Johanne Sloane
(source)
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