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process of signification is key in both cases – but to radically different ends. Regarding Godard's «Demoiselles d'Avignon» Wollen writes, «it dislocates signifier from signified, asserting – as such a dislocation must – the primacy of the first, without in any way dissolving the second.« [9] But what are the means of such a dislocation? In how many ways may it be brought about? At the close of his text, Wollen yearns for a convergence between these ostensibly so different methodologies, never suspecting he may have overlooked it. Although Wollen underscores the fact that the division between the two avant-gardes is not simply drawn along the lines of the absence or presence of political commitment, it is clear that divergent relationships to the referential qualities of filmic images are at issue here – and by extension, their divergent potential to affect political enlightenment. What is lacking for Wollen is a film that combines an investigation of the filmic dispositif in both the most mechanical and the most social sense, and at the same time does not disdain the attention of a mass audience. I would like to offer the example of several of Wieland's films as a corrective to this divide, in the
hope that it will be a first step towards more detailed analytical investigation of her oeuvre.