Reason Over Passion

Reason Over Passion (1969)

La raison avant la passion

The film consists primarily of degraded footage of landscapes shot from vehicles moving across the country; meanwhile, 537 computer-generated permutations of the film’s title appear like subtitles—the letters are scrambled over and over again, undermining the meaning of Pierre Trudeau's infamous motto.

Date of release
1969-01-02
TMDB
6.3 / 10 (6)
Runtime
1h 23m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Joyce Wieland

Casting

Interesting facts

Reason Over Passion is a Canadian experimental film, directed by Joyce Wieland and released in 1969. A reflection on Pierre Trudeau's famous public statement that he valued reason over passion in his approach to governing Canada, the film deconstructs the concept by blending news footage of Trudeau at the 1968 Liberal Party of Canada leadership election with tracking shots of the Canadian landscape, as the letters in the subtitle "reason over passion" rearrange and scramble into 537 nonsensical anagrams over the course of the film.

Production

Wieland worked on the film from 1967 to 1969. Wanting to capture Canadian landscapes under a range of seasonal and weather conditions, she began in Cape Breton Island and travelled west across Canada. The Vancouver Art Gallery held a retrospective of Wieland's work in early 1968, which she used as an opportunity to complete filming.

The film was also indirectly linked to a quilting project that Wieland first exhibited in 1968, which included quilts stitched with both the English "Reason Over Passion" and French "La Raison Avant La Passion" mottos.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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