At the Underground Festival that ran night and day in late December at the Elgin Theater, Snow’s films were pure reflective intelligence within an exacting, hard-nosed compositional system. The direct opposite is a random, hit-and-miss quality in Joyce Wieland’s La Raison Avant La Passion, a veritable pasture of expansive landscape imagery. The film is divided into three sections, a green section of the East. Coast, then a middle which is an ode to Trudeau (mostly Canadian flags and hot orange-red-pink face shots) and lastly an extraordinary white endlessness of snowscape. With its dry middle tone color, enough landscape texture for eighty Fitzgerald travelogues, and a straight-to-the-point, brisk camera eye that always runs far ahead of the transitory abstract insertions that try to hold the imagery in place, La Raison Avant La Passion is a clutter of love for Canada, done in the nick of
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