Quote:
"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:
Sitney, P. Adams. "There is Only One Joyce." ["[Originally appeared in] Artscanada 142-143 (Apr. 1970): 43-45."] In The Films of Joyce Wieland, edited by Kathryn Elder. Toronto: Toronto International Film Festival Group, 1999. (p. 48)