远岸

THE FAR SHORE, a 1976 Canadian feature fictional film by painter and filmmaker Joyce Wieland, has a continuing interest. In it we see how a woman experimental filmmaker has attempted to use melodramatic form for feminist ends. The film is in its subject matter a radical feminist polemic. It depicts the way that the bourgeois family entraps the individual, and it criticizes the nuclear family as the basic social model of patriarchal culture. In its style, THE FAR SHORE makes such an ideological critique by mixing a codified "avant-garde" style and the Hollywood generic conventions of domestic melodrama.
　　Generic-formula dramas and experimental cinema make markedly different sets of demands upon the spectator. Yet THE FAR SHORE did make explicit either within the text (the body of the film) or in its context of marketing and publicity that spectators must simultaneously comprehend both levels of discourse; and this led to serious problems for audiences' "reading" the film. Popular commercial movie audiences were not generally familiar with the way the Structural film style employed by Wieland disrupted the illusion of realist narrative, nor were they accustomed to the plethora of visual symbolism which makes the film coherent. At the same time, experimental cinema's followers were not comfortable with an avant-garde cinematic style that was so enmeshed in popular codes and so removed from its "pure" form, as seen usually then in low-budget, short, anti-narrative, personal films. Wieland's two largest potential audiences were unprepared for the "intertextual" familiarity necessary for "reading" the film, so the film did not have a financial success.
　　But the strengths of THE FAR SHORE are exactly those two stylistic strategies, the strategies that alienated audiences when the film was first released. THE FAR SHORE places a value on simultaneous cognition and on disrupting linear narrativity and illusionist spectacle. It uses these as a means to inaugurate a feminist discourse. Because it tried to establish the dynamics of a radical feminist film form, THE FAR SHORE has influenced British feminist theorist-filmmaker Laura Mulvey and Yvonne Rainer, one of the first U.S. filmmakers to pursue similar formal directions as a means for engaging political radicalism.[1][open notes in new window] THE FAR SHORE engages and critiques both Hollywood and experimental cinematic style in an attempt to create a commercially viable feminist cinema. Thus it prefigures a major direction that independent cinema would move in the 1980s.
　　THE FAR SHORE presents the story of Eulalie, a refined French Canadian woman who in 1919 marries a boorish Toronto engineer. The film's opening pre-credit sequence shows Eulalie being courted by her future husband in her native
　　Quebec. Accompanied by a young girl, Eulalie and Ross seem possibly able to establish an idealized nuclear family in the most romantic of all settings, a country landscape of flowers and grasses on a sunny summer day. Within that pastoral setting, we hear Eulalie's lilting French tones. Written English subtitles appear on the screen, suggesting the audience's distance from full, immediate identification with and comprehension of Eulalie's Quebecois culture. Eulalie expresses a greater love for her surroundings than for her companion, and he sees the land only as something to be improved scientifically while he stiffly struggles in English and broken French through the courtship ritual. The two characters represent simplified aspects of bi-cultural, bi-lingual Canada. This identification is further accentuated when the child serves as a go-between for Ro