Artist on Fire: the Work of Joyce Wieland

Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre STUDY GUIDE ARTIST ON FIRE: THE WORK OF JOYCE WIELAND CONTENTS INTRODUCTION At first glance, Artist on Fire: The Work of Joyce Wieland could be characterized Essay 1 as a generic “portrait film,” a form of documentary that typically celebrates and Questions 4 sketches the life and work of an eminent individual, usually a writer or artist. Additional Resources 5 Yet the film is very much of its time, influenced by ideas percolating in feminist Further Viewing 5 film theory in the 1980s. These notions specifically focused on the female body, About the Filmmaker 6 claiming that artistic practice could approximate a form of l’ecriture feminine, About the Author 6 writing on and of the body. Artist on Fire also marks a shift from the first genera- About the Project 6 tion of feminist filmmakers that relied on realist techniques, offering instead a more formally innovative hybrid film form that began to emerge in the late ’80s. CREDITS 6 Melding these two aspects (standard documentary form and a new theoretical awareness) Armatage forges a highly organic work, approximating, in filmic terms, the modalities of Wieland’s practice–in all its corporeal and personal, art historical, and social registers. CONTEXT The late ’70s helped spawn a feminist sub-genre in English Canada which came to fruition in the ’80s: the hybrid documentary film. Influenced by, but not neces- sarily aligned with, the avant-garde, the hybrid documentary also derives from the politics of locality. Committed to a referent, this mélange-like practice speaks from experience, and/or particular localities. Material is approached in a less totalizing fashion than the first wave of English Canadian feminist filmmaking, which tended to adopt the prevailing documentary techniques (variations of cinema direct and/or more conventional modes). Avoiding both modernism’s pyrotechnics and the pit- falls of a realist aesthetic, the hybrid composite combines a number of strategies, blending formal experimentation with information or analysis. While taken up with the immediacy of naming, the feminist hybrid problematizes the enunciation of filmmaking–a non-authorial narration offers a through-line to a work, while at the same time de-stabilizing the possibility of hagiography or self-expression. Such films shifted the frames of reference away from truth claims to stress the affective power of documentary. These films challenged the NFB’s hegemonic proliferation of a realist aesthetic, engendering an abiding belief, popular at the time, in the possibility that women could forge their own filmic language–one separate and distinct from a male economy of visual pleasure. Canada’s context gave rise to feminist works that both accepted and resisted “foreign” film theory, neither rejecting the new strategies evident in films produced in this “theoretical interlude,” nor unabashedly embracing them. The results are uncanny films that offer both a libidinal and a political engagement, to include both the social and the pleasures of spectatorship without imposing a resolution. As such, these films are neither avant-garde nor realist, embodying a situated, but poetic, knowledge that negotiates the in-between. http://www.cfmdc.org/home.php Page 1 of 6 STUDY GUIDE ARTIST ON FIRE: THE WORK OF JOYCE WIELAND THEMES Realizing this practice, Armatage riffs off of Wieland’s artistic practice, emphasizing the predominant themes that inform her work: women’s domestic labour and the female body, ecology and nationalism. Both pedagogical and sensual in intent and orientation, the film opens with a tableau vivant of muses-of-old gazing on while Wieland paints a self-portrait. Visuals are culled from a variety of sources: Wieland’s artworks (including paintings, plastic assemblages, lithographs, quilts); Wieland in extended conversation with Doris McCarthy (her former high school art teacher); a direct-address interview with the artist; and shots simply observing her painting, strolling through the woods or at home relaxing. Throughout, Wieland’s own films are seamlessly inter-cut. In spite of the film’s reliance on “great person” documentary clichés, such as the writer at his desk (or in this case, the artist at her easel) and art documentary conventions–the slow panning and zooming in and out of artworks matched with expert testimony attesting to her uniqueness and groundbreaking contributions, for example–Artist eschews their normalized effects, distance and objectivity. How is this achieved? Artist uses the tools of cinema–a combination of sumptuous visuals and a polyphonous voice track–to represent both Wieland and her practice. The effect is purely poetic and, at times, almost visceral. Throughout the film, close-ups of the female form recur, both representational and “real,” that are richly textured and sensual. STRUCTURE Artist is structured around a series of thematic clusters that begin and are driven by an elaboration of Wieland’s artistic process. We learn that Wieland’s creativity is anchored in the feminine, with a doubly spiritual female imaginary and concrete experience, rooted in women’s crafts such as quilt-making, informing her practice. Wieland’s art historical influences are also invoked, showing how she utilizes yet transforms the canon, drawing inspiration from artists as varied as Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (a 18th-century rococo master decorative painter), Klimt, Monet, Miro, and Warhol. Throughout, “expert” voice-offs overlay Wieland’s work, stressing the ways in which she defies categorization, a facet that is mimicked by the film’s hybrid nature. The following section builds upon the importance of nature in Wieland’s oeuvre and shifts back to further consideration of Wieland’s process–how she views her practice as co-creating with another source, and how she constantly shifts her mediums, always evolving. The next section foregrounds Wieland’s filmmaking, and here associational editing, specifically the graphic match, is employed to great effect. Shots of Wieland walking through the woods, for example, are linked to Tom Thompson’s cabin in The Far Shore (1975). While moving through movements that highlight Wieland’s engagement with the themes of nature, politics, nationalism, ecology, the domestic and sexuality, she is described as trying to define a Canadian sensibility and lauded for her courage to be both a visionary and activist. Above all, these various multivalent voices stress how Wieland was prophetic, experimenting with themes and films that hadn’t been explored earlier. This circling of a historical personage http://www.cfmdc.org/home.php Page 2 of 6 STUDY GUIDE ARTIST ON FIRE: THE WORK OF JOYCE WIELAND and her art could be viewed as experiments with modes of speaking to the idea of “Wieland.” This “idea” is re-constructed through a variety of techniques. On the one hand, the mix of multiple “official” discourses, the voices of Dennis Reid, Michael Snow, Joyce Zeman and Judy Steed, could be viewed as authorial sources. On the other hand, the manner in which a sense of Wieland and her work is evoked, the sumptuous re-presentation of her artistic process, for example, wildly pulls away from the effects of these documentary conventions of authority. VOICE: STRUCTURAL LYNCHPIN Artist relies heavily on the deployment of voice, combining differing modes of address that encompass what Bill Nichols has categorized as expository, observa- tional and interactive modes. Multiple perspectives on Wieland from a variety of vocal registers weigh in-from the art historical, to the material, to the personal. Thus, a single voice-over narration, the standard male voice which constitutes narratorial authority, is eschewed. Instead, voice here negotiates a double-edged function-part narrator, part social actor-that helps to suggest interiority or subjec- tivity. A rhythmic, almost breathless, rush of voices conjoins–in a sometimes staccato, sometimes lyrical manner–to give various ruminations on Wieland. Although we never see the individuals whose voices are heard on the soundtrack, their presence is made manifest through various contextual devices. Their voices weave informational backdrops to the images, often providing identificatory moments, when an image or ambient sound, for example, “grounds” or connects with the voice-over. Throughout, these anchoring nodal points concretize meaning and thus create the film’s logical through-line. Throughout, the “voice-offs” function as both participant and commentator, offering the basic “movement” of the film. As mentioned, these voices sometimes inform one another. Through such means, the idea of Wieland as a totality is suggested, but it is suggested through a stubborn refusal to synthesize interpretation or facts about her. In this way, Artist accounts for differences of interpretation within a collective frame and incorporates a number of voices without fully assimilating them. Voices blend into polyvalence, speaking around and to Wieland, but side- stepping the trap of “speaking for”–in short, the hagiographic. STYLE While voice augments the flow of the film, swinging between the historical and the embodied, its sensuous, fluid style owes much to its smooth editing. Transitions between the various movements of the films, as well as individual cuts within sequences, are constantly inter-cut with Wieland’s films in a calculated fashion. Associational editing and the constant use of the graphic match enhance the film’s ease. Wieland’s home is utilized to great effect, such as when shots of Wieland

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