Joyce Wieland's LA RAISON AVANT LA PASSION April 27, 2007

1968-69, 80 minutes, 16mm, color, sound.

"Joyce Wieland's rarely screened 1969 masterpiece is a neglected landmark of avant-garde film. Taking the form of a cross-country trip on the Trans-Canada Highway, a mostly two-lane road that snakes through forests and mountain ranges, it affords views very different from those offered by U.S. interstates. The sameness of a road trip – the way all windshield views begin to look alike – is modified by a feeling of openness, as Wieland joins images not to fuse two parts of the land but to suggest the unseen spaces between them. Superimposed on the landscapes are anagrams of the phrase 'la raison avant la passion,' taken from a speech by Canada's former prime minister Pierre Trudeau. But the poetic quality of the landscapes seems to argue for passion over reason, as does Wieland's playful rearranging of the letters. At the same time, the systematic way the letters are shifted suggests a rational method, and the film is sincere enough to take the prime minister seriously." –Fred Camper, CHICAGO READER

"LA RAISON AVANT LA PASSION is Joyce Wieland's major film so far. With its many eccentricities, it is a glyph of her artistic personality; a lyric vision tempered by an aggressive form and a visionary patriotism mixed with ironic self-parody. It is a film to be seen many times." –P. Adams Sitney, FILM CULTURE