Betty Ferguson

Considered one of Canada's most important women artists of the second half of the 20th century, Joyce Wieland's art embodies the essence of her homeland, feminism, and ecology. Artist on Fire: Joyce Wieland captures the vibrant spirit of this painter, collagist, quilt maker, and filmmaker. In the early '70s, Wieland was involved in filmmaking, producing movies with a political message. In her 30-year career, she worked in a variety of mediums, including cloth, pastels, colored pencil, oils, bronze, and watercolor. Her works and her influence are examined in this detailed video portrait.

"The whole film are non-art portraits of people in which they do what they want with this hat – and therefore, act or stand in front of my camera. It’s only love: therefore it can’t harm you". Joyce Wieland.

Constructed from found and stock footage, Barbara’s Blindness is a meditation on vision and adversity, drawing humour and pathos from a moralising educational film.

First shown on January 30, 1967, FOR LIFE AGAINST THE WAR was an open-call, collective statement from American independent filmmakers disparate in style and sensibility but united by their opposition to the Vietnam War. Part of the protest festival Week of the Angry Arts, the epic compilation film incorporated minute-long segments which were sent from many corners of the country, spliced together and projected. The original presentation of the works was more of an open forum with no curation or selection, and in 2000 Anthology Film Archives preserved a print featuring around 40 films from over 60 submissions.

Spanning 40 years of aviation through feature clips wrenched from their cozy narrative settings, the film switches perspectives relentlessly. Pilots gaze out of windows to static shots of the earth. Air Force captains inspect the sky for enemy death machines. Desert nomads (Hollywood style) look expectantly for the winged messiah.

"Not enough attention is paid to photogenic objects. A telephone receiver, for instance..." - Louis Delluc.

"Betty Ferguson's 'Kisses', an hour-long anthology of film clips presented without titles or voiceover, is the sweetest and, in avant-garde terms, the most conventional film on the program. Although the kiss reached its supreme expression as the on-screen replacement for copulation in post-Code Hollywood, Ferguson's material is drawn largely from silent classics and the less-fetishized European cinema of around 1960. She compares her film to a patchwork quilt, but it's basically morphological, cataloguing clusters of shots where kisses are delivered to the hand, the neck, rained down on a beloved face, perfunctorily bestowed on a spouse, awarded to dogs, dolls, gun, etc." - J. Hoberman, Village Voice