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Themesicon: navigation pathArt and Cinematographyicon: navigation pathWieland
 
 
 
 
 

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symptomatic of the feminist slant to her work. Similarly, she investigated the «here and now» implied by the Canadian nationalism which was budding throughout the 1950s and raging like a (courteous) wildfire by the late 1960s. Northrop Frye has written that the conundrum of Canadian identity cannot be addressed through a simple examination of self, but rather that the Canadian sensibility has been «less perplexed by the question ‹Who am I?› than by some such riddle as ‹Where is here?›» [4] Wieland' s work takes up the task of specifying the place from which meaning emerges, in both an individual and a geographic sense. Finally, formally, her work was often rigorously sparse, obliquely pointing out the various repercussions of the filmic dispositif, yet was never without humour. It is these three features in combination, Wieland's focus on the specifics of the domestic sphere, her insistence on the difficulty of defining «where is here?» and her inclination towards a reductive aesthetic, have contributed to a body of work that, in its eclecticism, seems to continue to be largely illegible to critics and scholars alike. [5]

 

Passion

While the historiographies of art and film have neglected Wieland’s work, it would be misleading to suggest that she was unknown to and under appreciated by all her contemporaries. Annette Michelson, for instance, a key ally for the most successful of the structural filmmakers, was an early supporter of Wieland's. In conversation with Giuliana Bruno in 1986, Michelson described her own interest in avant-garde film upon her return to America in 1968 and her concomitant growing interest in work done by women as being partially contingent on her discovery of Wieland. Yet, despite quite a passionate affinity for Wieland's films, she neglected to ever do her the honour of producing an extended analysis of her work. [6] It seems to be a somewhat disconcerting passion that Wieland's films arouse, disarming in its blunt enthusiasm. Indeed this passion is what separates Wieland from her fellow structural filmmakers and is what makes her work so difficult to penetrate analytically; for while there is a structural coolness to many of her films there is equally an ardent, nearly raw insistence on the relevance of the specificity of time

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