JIGS AND REELS: THE FILMS OF JOYCE WIELAND
CO-PRESENTED BY THE ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO, TIFF CINEMATHEQUE AND AD HOC
OCTOBER 20, 2025-NOVEMBER 19, 2025
Free admission.
“[Joyce Wieland’s films] have a conceptual richness that can’t be ascribed to just one historical moment. There’s a humor that runs through her work, but also a sense of excess and exuberance—a joy in the body, in flesh and in light.” (Kay Armatage)
Born and raised in Toronto, Joyce Wieland (1930–1998) was one of Canada’s most prominent and prolific twentieth-century artists. She spent the late 1950s and early 1960s drawing and painting and was increasingly included in exhibitions across the country. By 1960, Wieland was represented by The Isaacs Gallery, with whom she continued to exhibit until the late 1980s. Beginning in 1962, she spent a decade in New York City, making assemblages, quilts and experimental films while continuing to show her work. In her filmmaking, Wieland explored a wide array of modes of expression, from short lyrical and political films, a feature narrative film, The Far Shore, and her cinematic magnum opus, La raison avant la passion/Reason over Passion.
While pursuing her career as a visual artist in Toronto, Wieland was developing a strong interest in cinema through her commercial work at George Dunning’s Graphic Associates studio, her day job as it were, doing animation “fill-ins” and colouring cells, working with cinema at the level of the frame in a tactile manner. As far as Toronto filmmakers go there was barely a scene, so Wieland’s community in that regard consisted of Michael Snow and other colleagues at Graphic Associates who made spoof films in their spare time in 16mm and 8mm.
Moving to New York with Snow in 1962, Wieland was introduced to a coterie of underground filmmakers and artists, from Ken and Flo Jacobs to Jonas Mekas, and Geoge and Mike Kuchar. They would mutually inspire each other’s anarchic and irreverent aesthetics. This was initially borne out in a series of performance-based films, but with 1965’s Water Sark, Wieland had an artistic breakthrough, turning the camera on her body and her domestic setting: “I decided to make a film at my kitchen table, there is nothing like knowing my table. […] you take prisms, glass, lights and myself to it.”
The films that followed demonstrated that Wieland was not tethered to a single style or formal approach. Sailboat (1967), for example, and 1933, share traits with other filmmakers who were identified by some critics as “structural filmmakers” (artists like Snow, Paul Sharits, and Ernie Gehr), but there was a lyrical quality to Wieland’s approach, and a refusal to be “rigorous” that set her films apart. Handtinting and Catfood, also made in 1967, demonstrate an interest in duration, repetition, and the materiality of film, but it would miss the point to reduce the films to those properties. Instead, they are expressions of life and bodies in motion, human and feline.
Rat Life and Diet in North America (1968), while showing Wieland’s trademark humour and sense of joy, is her first full expression, in film, of the tragedy of Canada in 1968, the central device of the rats (played by gerbils) pursued by the totalitarian predators, cats, being “an allegory used in a manner conscious of the two sides of the film’s narrative.” (Stephen Broomer)
Wieland’s cinematic pièce de résistance, La région centrale/Reason over Passion (1969) is in fact part of a suite of works consisting of quilts and etchings, reflecting on Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s ideology that Wieland came to see as aligned with American technocratic thinking, and in opposition to her own attraction to a more poetic, erotic, life force. This was followed up by three films that were even more explicitly political, three films she made in collaboration with the journalist Judy Steed, including The Far Shore (1976), a feature narrative film loosely based on the life of Tom Thomson. It was perhaps her most ambitious and her most disappointing work, as it was not well received critically or commercially at the time. Wieland retreated from filmmaking, though in the early 1980s she completed a number of films that had been left unfinished including Peggy’s Blue Skylight (1964/1986), and A and B in Ontario (1967/1984), a playful film she shot in 1967 with Hollis Frampton, and completed on hearing of his passing in 1984.
All films in 16mm unless otherwise noted.
MONDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2025, 7PM
Program 1
The camera and the body: Early short films (1963-1967)
INNIS TOWN HALL, 2 SUSSEX AVENUE
FREE OF CHARGE, NO TICKET NECESSARY
INTRODUCED BY IZABELLA PRUSKA-OLDENHOF
The earliest films made by Wieland in New York were performance-based works. Wieland was influenced by other underground filmmakers, but her unique sense of bawdy humour set her films apart, making them an important part of her oeuvre.
With Water Sark (1965), Wieland had a major aesthetic breakthrough. Where her previous films were still rooted in some vestige of narrative, Water Sark was a self-sufficient film that needed no people. Further, while her earlier work was already engaged with sexuality, especially of a phallic nature, with Water Sark she turns her attention to her own feminine body.
1967’s Handtinting is another milestone, foretelling ecofeminist aesthetics, where the distinctions between art and life, the body and the world are blurred.
Larry’s Recent Behaviour, 1963, colour/b&w, sound, 17 min.
Inspired by neo-Dadaism, and her own innate sense of the absurd, Wieland cuts from “Larry”’s body parts to Jackie Kennedy’s reaction to John F. Kennedy’s assassination, while playing “I Have a Boyfriend”, the Chiffons song that was playing on Dallas radio when the news of the assassination broke.
Peggy’s Blue Skylight, 1964, b&w, sound, 12 min.
A day in the life, from noon to dawn, of Joyce Wieland and Michael Snow, with friends visiting their loft in NYC. Music by Paul Bley.
Patriotism 1, 1964, colour, sound, 4 min.
“Wieland once called this her ‘hot dog film’ and downplayed it as a ‘technically bad’ experiment in animation. But as an early product of her New York years […] the film gestures toward a view of the male body as a complex, vulnerable site, criss-crossed by power and inscribed with the marks of gendered national identity.” (Lee Parpart)
Patriotism 2, 1965, colour, silent, 4 min.
A portrait of filmmaker Dave Shackman with the American flag, featuring stop-motion animation of a dinner table swirling and gathering in a ball.
Water Sark, 1965, colour, sound, 14 min.
Wieland’s body is visible in the film, but abstracted by the framing, her hand manipulating objects, shooting through glasses while pouring liquids in them, and all of this refracted off of a mirror creating new shapes and colours. The free jazz soundtrack by Carla Bley, Ray Jessel and Mike Mantler heightens the kinaesthetic quality of the film.
Handinting, 1967, colour, silent, 6 min.
“Handtinting remains a touchstone miracle. how did she manage to say so much with so little?” (Mike Hoolboom)
TRT: 57 min.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2025, 6:30PM
Program 2
VARIETIES OF FILM FORM (1967-1969)
PRESENTED AT TIFF LIGHTBOX, 333 KING STREET WEST
INTRODUCED BY NATANIA SHERMAN
TICKETS AVAILABLE THROUGH TIFF LIGHTBOX.
The six films on this program, made from 1967 to 1969, are each significant achievements in the repertoire of avant-garde cinema, and yet each has a distinct formal modus operandi. The illusion of looping and the use of text drive both Sailboat and 1933, but in each case playfully creating a sense of mystery, ambiguity and wonder. Dripping Water, a single long take of water dripping onto a plate, is a concise amalgam of Snow’s interest and 1933 are mysterious, though the first film is perhaps the most lyrical of the three, and relates to her other Dripping Water is perhaps the most austere of the three films, and the last film Wieland would make
Barbara’s Blindness, co-directed with Betty Ferguson, 1967, colour/b&w, 17 min.
In 1965 Wieland collaborated with her friend Betty Ferguson, whom she had met in Toronto, on Barbara’s Blindness (1965), a juxtaposition of a found educational film about blindness, with seemingly random clips from other sources that challenged viewers’ expectations.
Sailboat, 1967, colour, sound, 3 min.
“Coming at the end of her first cycle of cinema experiments, Sailboat serves suggestively as a ‘summing-up.’ […] Sailboat is possessed of a gentleness that her work in other media keep to their boundaries.” (Bart Testa)
Cat Food, 1967, colour, sound, 14 min.
“A cat eats its methodical way through a polymorphous fish. The projector devours the ribbon of film at the same rate, methodically. […]” (Hollis Frampton)
1933, 1967, colour, sound, 4 min.
“1933. The year? The number? The title? Was it (the film) made then? It’s a memory (i.e. a Film). No, it’s many memories. It’s so sad and (funny): the departed, departing people, cars, street! It hurries, it’s gone, it’s back! It’s the only glimpse we have but we can have it again. […] You find out, if you didn’t already know, how naming tints pure vision.” (Michael Snow)
Rat Life and Diet in North America, 1968, colour, sound, 16 min.
For various reasons, including her opposition to the U.S. war against Vietnam, Wieland grew disillusioned with life there. This is evident in Rat Life and Diet in North America, a plea for Canadian sovereignty in light of American multinational takeovers and the military-industrial complex. Filmmaker and scholar Bruce Elder called it “far and away Wieland’s best experimental film.”
Dripping Water, 1969, b&w, sound, 10 min. “Wieland worked with Michael Snow to make Dripping Water, in which the illusion of superimposed visual and audio tracks is created and then dispelled. The idea of a loop suggested by the water steadily dripping into a dish from the top of the frame for ten minutes and returning to its source by means of a hidden hydraulic device.” (Vincent Bonin)
TRT: 64 min.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 29, 6:30PM
Program 3
CAMARADERIE
PRESENTED AT TIFF LIGHTBOX, 333 KING STREET WEST
INTRODUCED BY SU RYNARD
TICKETS AVAILABLE THROUGH TIFF LIGHTBOX.
Shortly after her return to Toronto, Wieland met the CTV reporter Judy Steed. Inspired by a book by the former leader of the Font de libération du Québec, Pierre Vallières, where he compared the plight of French-Canadians with that of African Americans, Wieland and Steed collaborated on a film about him, with Wieland on picture and Steed on sound, roles they would repeat on Solidarity. The program includes two other collaborations, A and B in Ontario and Birds at Sunrise, two films that Wieland finished with the assistance of her niece Su Rynard.
Pierre Vallières, 1972, colour, sound, 33 min., digital transfer from 16mm film.
Steed and Wieland failed to get CTV to do a documentary on Vallières, but collaborated anyhow on the work that became Pierre Vallières, a film of close-ups of Vallières’s mouth, with his crooked teeth and moustache, delivering monologues on two colonized groups, the Québécois and women.
Solidarity, 1973, colour sound, 11 min.
Another collaboration with Judy Steed, Solidarity consists primarily of hand-held footage of people’s feet at a march on the Kitchener-Waterloo Dare Cookie plant, with the word “solidarity” superimposed on the screen, and a soundtrack recording of strike leaders.
A and B in Ontario, 1984, b&w, sound, 16 min.
“Hollis and I came back to Toronto on holiday in the summer of ‘67. We were staying at a friend’s house. We worked our way through the city and eventually made it to the island. We followed each other around. We enjoyed ourselves. We said we were going to make a film about each other – and we did”. (Joyce Wieland)
Birds at Sunrise, 1986, colour, sound, 10 min.
Wieland shot this film in 1972 shortly after she returned to Toronto. She recalls getting up at 4am to shoot birds in the window, sometimes using rolled-up paper and cardboard to create irises. “It was the life of birds at the window when dawn’s coming and the light is changing.” (Joyce Wieland)
TRT: 70 min.
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2025, 6:30PM
Program 4
REASON OVER PASSION
PRESENTED AT TIFF LIGHTBOX, 333 KING STREET WEST
INTRODUCED BY STEPHEN BROOMER
TICKETS AVAILABLE THROUGH TIFF LIGHTBOX.
Wieland would not physically move back to Canada until 1971 but it’s clear that the decision was made several years before that. In the meantime, she made her most complex film, Reason over Passion/La raison avant la passion (1967-69), a culmination of her artistic exploration of belonging. it is an elegy for what may already be lost: “I was in a panic; an ecological, spiritual panic about this country. […] I photographed the whole length of southern Canada to preserve it in my own way, with my own vision of it. […] The total result of the finished film is a nostalgic, sad feeling about the landscape.”
La raison avant la passion/Reason over passion, 1969, colour, sound, 84 min.
Reason over Passion reveals the vastness of her “home” through cinematic landscapes. The film weaves together a cross-Canada odyssey. Bracketed by manipulated footage of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, it presents east-to-west and west-to-east journeys. Flags are projected on screen, sometimes intercut with landscape footage, seemingly random yet forming a metaphorical quilt as described by Wieland herself.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2025, 7PM
Program 5
ARTIST ON FIRE
PRESENTED BY THE AGO, INNIS COLLEGE, THE CINEMA STUDIES INSTITUTE, AND AD HOC AT INNIS TOWN HALL, 2 SUSSEX AVENUE
FREE OF CHARGE, NO TICKET NECESSARY
INTRODUCED BY KAY ARMATAGE
Artist on Fire: Joyce Wieland, dir. Kay Armatage, 1987, colour, sound, 54 min.
In Artist on Fire, Armatage made the decision to focus on Wieland’s work and to eschew biographical details. Instead, she foregrounds Wieland’s “spontaneity, playfulness, sensuality, joyful discovery, the language of unconscious processes, and the traces of her own body as both image content and process of production.” At the same time Armatage emphasizes that her own working methods, which are informed by more theoretical concerns, are completely different from Wieland’s. Hence, “the exciting task of Artist on Fire was not only to engage with Wieland’s work without succumbing to imitation, but to effect an interweaving of two opposite styles without producing one as comment upon the other.” She does acknowledge that the use of voice-overs, multiple and not acknowledged until the end of the film, may have been inspired by Wieland’s approach to sound, especially in films like Solidarity. While Wieland’s voice is clear and uninterrupted, the other voices – friends, colleagues, critics – are off-screen, more fragmented and unscripted, and include personal, scholarly, critical, and poetic responses to her work, unidentified and disembodied, intercut with sonic reverb, sound effects, music, and sound from Wieland’s films.
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 6:30PM
Program 6
THE FAR SHORE
PRESENTED AT TIFF LIGHTBOX, 333 KING STREET WEST
INTRODUCED BY GEORGIANA UHLYARIK
TICKETS AVAILABLE THROUGH TIFF LIGHTBOX.
In the mid-1970s, Wieland embarked on her most ambitious project, The Far Shore, a commercial 35mm feature narrative. One can consider The Far Shore part of the trilogy of works concerned with the environment, imperialism, and Canadian nationalism, along with Rat Life and Diet in North America and Reason over Passion/La raison avant la passion. The film reinterprets the figure of Tom Thomson. The film’s main protagonist, Eulalie, is a strong female character who challenges societal expectations. Her story is told through the subversive lens of melodrama, and explores the complex relationship between humans and the natural world, evoking pathos and reflection.
The Far Shore, 1976, 35mm, colour, sound, 105 min.
“Ambitious and meticulous, years in the making, exploiting some of the top cinema craftspeople in Canada’s film industry, The Far Shore (1976) appropriated and messed around with the genre of period melodrama, presenting a visual allegory about the patriarchal and colonial subjection of women, creative artists, the natural environment, and ultimately the moral degradation of the colonials themselves.” (Jonathan Culp)