Quote:
"[In Pierre Vallières (1972), Joyce] Wieland focuses entirely on the lips of an eloquent separatist, echoing and expanding her paintings of lips, several of which (West 4th, 1963) in themselves echoed film strips. In fact, her oeuvre is notable for its wholeness. Those circles and lips (and those circular lips) can be found not only in the paintings and in Pierre Vallières, but in the other films as well—in the feature The Far Shore (1976), when the hero and heroine silently mouth words to each other through magnifying glasses, and in Water Sark (1965), where domestic items on a kitchen table are presented with reverence and are filmed through glasses of water, and in Reason over Passion (1969), in which Wieland mouths the national anthem, and most of all in Birds at Sunrise (shot in 1972, completed in 1986), which literally sees through a circle—Wieland photographed birds through cardboard tubes [...] and in the process exalted them, both sensually and spiritually, in a fashion that recalls O'Keefe's canonization of flowers."
-- Jay Scott

Source:
Scott, Jay. "Full circle." Canadian Art, March 1987. (p. 60)