the form of a written text) and the body that undergoes experience in society tends to be taken for granted, and yet it functions as the visual guarantor of the authenticity and validity of the statement given. In Wieland's works the separation effected through the visual reductio ad absurdum denaturalizes the relationship between visceral experience and political (or other) discourse, suggesting, on the one hand that the words spoken are not equal to the experience had by the body and on the other, that the reception of the products of experience’s translation into language is equally fraught.

»Solidarity«

The 11-minute film «Solidarity» documents a strike at the Dare Cookie factory in Kitchener, Ontario. A single shot of the feet of the workers walking through grass is combined with the voice of a female striker relating the issues at stake over a loudspeaker. Throughout the entirety of the film the word SOLIDARITY is superimposed over the image. The film resists the inclination to show the faces of the strikers focusing instead on the state of their various shoes, the hems of

their pants and their stockings, all showing traces of having stood for long periods in the mud of a field. This framing highlights the wear that is visible on the feet and shoes and speaks implicitly of the traces of class and physical exertion. This relatively simple example demonstrates a strategy that is put to more complex use in «Pierre Vallières» leaving 3 distinct levels of information to each stand in isolation.

»Pierre Vallières«

A member of the FLQ (Front de Liberation de Québec) often considered its chief philosopher, «Pierre Vallières» was best known as the author of «Les Négres blancs d’Amerique,» an autobiographically-based description of the stunning extent of Québecois oppression. Wieland conducted and recorded an interview with Vallières on three rolls of film shortly after he was released from prison in the United States. His health was poor; the rolls are allowed to run to their full extent while Vallières speaks spontaneously on three topics: the degree of economic exploitation in his region of Quebec; the meaning of race for the history of oppression in Quebec and the relationship