On Friday, October 10th, at 7pm, join us at FMC Screening Room (475 Park Avenue South, 6th Floor) for a rare screening of Joyce Wieland's seminal feature film La Raison Avant La Passion (Reason Over Passion), presented on 16mm and introduced by Julia Petrocelli.

Joyce Wieland (1930—1998) was a Canadian activist and filmmaker whose work traverses mediums in pursuit of national truths. She was born to British immigrant parents who passed soon after her seventh birthday; therefore, she grew up largely without parents and only with her siblings facing financial difficulties. During this time, Wieland found solace in comic books and art which led her to study painting and graphic design, where she found a mentor in Canadian Landscape painter Doris McCarthy. Here, Wieland began her career working as a painter in Toronto in the ‘50s while designing commercial packaging. A few years later she moved to New York where she started to experiment with film, working through political issues of war, gender, oppression, and nationalism.

“Reason Over Passion” is a quote from Pierre Trudeau, the 15th Prime Minister of Canada, in his famous public statement at the 1968 Liberal Party of Canada Leadership election which he would go on to win unexpectedly. The conversation that ensued between the potential successors of the leader of Canada’s Liberal Party, Trudeau, Robert Winters, and John Turner (who would go on to be the country's 17th prime minister) is regarded as one of the most confusing and circuitous discussions in Canadian politics. Reason Over Passion is a film that deals with specificities and generalities; the specificities of site, the generalities of language. Wieland complicates these relationships primarily by taking the titular phrase and jumbling its letters into oblivion, creating unintelligible subtitles throughout the film, mimicking the Leadership election’s ambiguity through its misnomer.

Reason Over Passion is a negotiation between land and the systems that govern it. Wieland positions the camera out of the windshield of a car, following different vastnesses of the Canadian landscape; roads, hills, clouds. There is a loneliness in the unspecific, as illustrated by Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents — a series of abstract sky photographs from 1928 that are, in essence, interchangeable — the exact location or coordinates become irrelevant, allowing the cloud to emerge as a universal and widely recognizable image & signifier. Wieland traverses this ecological vagueness, occasionally reaching a punctuation mark; the Canadian flag and Trudeau’s visage gives direction, a clue in a scavenger hunt, coupled by the sound of a subtle alarm, rhythmically imposing order and governance. Same goes for a cupcake, a dog, collecting coordinates through their image and persistence. Soon and quickly engulfed by a sea of snow, sky and grass. Wieland endures the land, working through it, out a window, through a screen moving quickly.

Total Run Time: 80 minutes.

Format: 16mm.