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 time before it changes completely into a scrubby Buffalo suburb. Its image is very rectangular: an endlessly outpouring ribbon streaks horizontally across the screen; occasionally it swells and bends, digesting mountain-rimmed lakes, gorges, rivers, going past farm buildings, in and out of Montreal. It never quite outdoes, in 85 minutes, the grandeur of the first ingenious moment, a swelling impression of the Atlantic Ocean seen right side up and upside down.
Wieland’s Cat Food is about a rotund cat and how he eats a fish. An explicit movie and an exercise in simplicity, it has three elements: well-fed, insatiable cat, pretty-but-dead fish, all on a tabletop with a flat black background.
1933, an even harder haiku-like movie to examine in depth, has the numerals of the title on a blank screen alternated with a street scene of quick walkers, who suggest the fast-funny actors in old movies. Wieland repeats the recipe six times and that’s it.
