The Films of Joyce Wieland ed. by Kathryn Elder (review)

360 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 of a life=s work that generates a 10-page bibliography of published books, articles, and reviews. Inevitably, some complexity and density has to be traded in for clarity. In providing an overview of Taylor=s work, Abbey has made a judicious decision to focus on five central themes: morality, conceptions of the self, politics, knowledge and epistemology, and the idea of secularity. Taylor=s views on language and its centrality to human existence are not accorded separate treatment; instead they are noted and discussed as core ingredients of each of the categories. The selection provides a compact but thorough survey of Taylor=s project, and one is tempted to infer from the acknowledgments that it has his imprimatur. In each of the five chapters, Abbey introduces a number of important subthemes. To take one representative example, in the chapter on politics Abbey gives a snapshot of Taylor=s views on communitarianism (noting the contrast he makes between ontology and advocacy issues), atomism, negative freedom, liberalism, republicanism, hypergoods, shared goods, the politics of recognition, state neutrality, public space, and civil society. This is a lot of ground to cover. The points come with blistering speed, and while they are unfailingly faithful to Taylor=s text and general orientation, the arguments are occasionally somewhat truncated. Furthermore, there is hardly any opportunity to consider objections or refinements that might arise quite naturally in a reader=s mind. Clearly a decision has been made to leave that kind of detail to a different level of critical engagement. In the final analysis, Charles Taylor achieves its stated purpose of providing a clear introduction to Taylor=s core philosophical commitments. It is an astute guide that piques the reader=s interest, highlights major themes and their interconnections, and paves the way for further reading and research. (MICHAEL MILDE) Kathryn Elder, editor. The Films of Joyce Wieland Cinematheque Ontario. x, 270. $26.95 >Joyce Wieland radically reworked cinema.= This statement by Laurence Kardish, senior curator of the Museum of Modern Art=s Department of Film and Video, heads the back cover of The Films of Joyce Wieland, a collection of critical writing on the films of Canadian visual artist Joyce Wieland (1931B98). The book includes fifteen critical pieces published between 1970 and 1994 as well as two 1971 interviews with Wieland, filmmaker/critic Bruce Elder=s commentary on one of these interviews, an original essay by film historian Michael Zyrd summarizing the critical reception of Wieland=s films over the decades, a 331-item annotated bibliographic guide to film literature on Wieland with author index and film title index, and an illustrated filmography. HUMANITIES 361 Editor Kathryn Elder=s foreword holds a wealth of detail, as does the even briefer introduction by the Art Gallery of Ontario=s chief curator, Dennis Reid. Elder sketches Wieland=s life, her art career in general, her film career, and the thrust of critical writing on her work to date, skilfully linking the pieces in this book to Wieland=s major career developments. Elder gives special emphasis, rightly, to the 1987 >polemic= by film historian Kass Banning, in which Banning argues that Wieland=s having been taken up by American liberal feminism had the effect of suppressing her early and complex engagement with narrative, myth, parody, identity, text/image tension and interplay, sexual difference, local critical, political, and nationalist concerns, and issues of representation, all of which make Wieland a postmodernist almost before the fact, and certainly before more famous American feminist artists such as Judy Chicago. Filmmaker and academic Kay Armatage, in another fascinating 1987 essay, uses the theories of French feminists Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigarary to present a framework for seeing Wieland=s films, especially the 1964 film Water Sark, as the >tracing of the feminine body across the contours of the human body.= (Wieland herself is quoted elsewhere as saying publicly >I don=t know what the hell theory has to do with seeing,= but in the context of a book like this her position becomes simply one of many.) These two feminist essays reflect Zyrd=s observation that feminism has been the most prominent of the three major...