Cinema Canada (Apr 1976)

wood, incidentally and importantly, worked with Nell Shipman, the first Canadian woman director. Shipman’s film Back to God’s Country, shot on location in Calgary and the Yukon in 1919, was based on a Curwood story — it is a melodrama to which The Far Shore bears striking affinity. (Joyce Wieland had not seen Back to God’s Country when she filmed The Far Shore.) The Far Shore is rooted in the reality of the Canadian landscape, in the reality of destruction of that landscape by willfully ignorant men, in the reality of English Canadian distrust and animosity towards the ‘‘alien’”’ — the artist, the Quebecois, the unconventional woman. I did my best to embrace the form of the feature film in this work, without compromising myself. What I had developed in my past films was stillness, the use of grain, love of light, and personal subject matter. I brought my knowledge of film and joined it to traditional form. JW The Far Shore, once again, is a simple film, with clear, somewhat stilted dialogue, and a strongly marked narrative line. There are rarely more than three figures in the frame, and the relations between characters are precisely delineated. This is no Hollywood flick, a far cry from the surface density of, say,. Robert Altman. Unlike many commercial features, The Far Shore does not bury its ideology in tricky metaphor — the filmmaker conveys her beliefs as directly as possible, in dialogue and action, as well as visuals and music. When Tom tells Ross he is opposed to mining which will leave the land scarred like a battlefield and Cluny sneers “How would a goddammed pacifist know what a battlefield looks like?” Tom’s answer is decisive, “An old soldier told me.” Cluny has no reply but violence — the accuracy of Tom’s answer is reinforced by Cluny’s action. Considering that the film ends with the deaths of Tom and Eulalie, must we say that the vision is bleak? I would suggest that the ending is real, as the best melodrama is real, based Joyce Wieland Filmography 1958 Tea in the Garden, Collins & Wieland, 16mm, 4 min. 1959 + Assault in the Park, Snow & Wieland, 20 min. 1963 Larry’s Recent Behaviour, 8 mm, color, 18 min. 1964 Peggy’s Blue Skylight, 8mm, 17 min. 1964 Patriotism, Part I. 8mm, color, 15 min. 1964 Patriotism, Part II. 8mm, color, 5 min. 1964-5 Water Sark, 16mm, color, 14 min. 1967-8 Sailboat, 16mm (black min. on a true analysis of the situation. By retreating to an impossible idyll of escape in the woods, Tom and. Eulalie react as romantic individuals to a force much larger than Ross and Cluny — they have no concept of collective struggle. Joyce Wieland, in her struggle to gather the money and resources to make The Far Shore,* is herself an object lesson in how the artist as romantic individual must also learn to work collectively and in realistic terms simply to produce and show her work. Canadians wouldn’t buy Tom Thomson’s cowless paintings until long after his death — hopefully they will respond more immediately to the living art of Joyce Wieland. 0 * See Doug Fetherling’s account of the financial history of The Far Shore: “Joyce Wieland in Movieland,” The Canadian, Jan. 24, 1976. All quotations are taken from an interview recorded on August 2, 1975, in Toronto, revised by Joyce Wieland in October 1975. © Barbara Halpern Martineau, 1975. 1967-8 1933 Hand Tinting, 16mm, color, 4 1968 Catfood, 16mm, color, 13 min. 1968 Rat Life and Diet in North America, 16mm, color, 14 min. 1967-9 Reason Over Passion, 16mm, color, 90 min. 1969 Dripping Water, Snow and Wieland, 16mm, 10 min. 1972 and white, printed on color stock) 3'2 min. Pierre Vallieres, 16mm, 33 min. 1976 The Far Shore, 35mn, Lhr. 46 min. 406 JARVIS ST. TORONTO, ONTARIO M4Y 2G6 TEL. (416) 921-4121 April 1976 / 23