Water Sark

Directed by Joyce Wieland

Canada, 1965 (experimental, 14 minutes, colour)

Image: © Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre

Film Description:
"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 (source)

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Notes about Water Sark

Shown at the Women and Film International Festival (Toronto) in 1973.

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Quote by the Director

"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."
-- Joyce Wieland (source)

Quotes about Water Sark

"Although [Joyce] Wieland's work had from the early part of her career been concerned with sex and sexuality, including considerable attention to phallic sexuality, in Water Sark one can see in process her 'discovery' of the feminine body. This 'feminine body' is traced upon the female body in much of her work, but it also becomes a practice of image construction through which she is able to operate the feminine over the male body in a very literal displacement of the phallic."
-- Kay Armatage (source)

"Water Sark [...] set a precedent for a feminist self-representation due to its direct and celebratory exploration of female subjectivity. [...] Wieland created an empowered language of the feminine on her own terms, long before better known endeavours such as Judy Chicago's Feminist Art Program [...]."
-- Anne Low (source)

"In Water Sark (1964-1965) Wieland films kitchen objects (crockery, rubber gloves, a tea pot) as well as her own body to discover and define a feminine space."
-- Janine Marchessault (source)

"Water Sark is [Joyce] Wieland's most revealing film in the sense that camera and subject are used in an exploratory, even naive way: we can see how patterns develop through variation, repetition and pace. Here is the artist improvising freely and joyously with her materials, her camera and herself."
-- Hugo McPherson (source)

"Watersark is a film about the way we perceive things. Flowers, toy ships, cats, all the familiar objects that are a part of [Joyce Wieland's] life appear altered by being seen through the prisms of water, drinking glasses, or a magnifying glass. Sometimes the objects are animated. Always they move with the Wieland spirit of happy fantasy. For Pierre Théberge, the assistant curator of Canadian Art for the National Gallery, Watersark is 'the most extraordinary of the Canadian underground films.'"
-- Wendy Michener (source)

Bibliography for Water Sark

Book Chapters

Armatage, Kay. "The Feminine Body: Joyce Wieland's Water Sark." In Dialogue : cinéma canadien et québécois = Dialogue: Canadian and Quebec Cinema, edited by Michael Dorland, Seth Feldman, and Pierre Véronneau, 283-295. Montréal: Mediatexte Publications, 1987. [English / French]

Brief Sections of Books

Nowell, Iris. Joyce Wieland: A Life in Art. Toronto: ECW Press, 2001. (pp. 228-237)

Journal Articles

Armatage, Kay. "Feminine Body: Joyce Wieland's Water Sark." Canadian Woman Studies / Les Cahiers de la femme 8, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 84-88.