‘What is a mouth’: Joyce Wieland’s Pierre Vallières (1972) and the politics of the film portrait
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Focusing on Joyce Wieland’s film portrait Pierre Vallières (1972), this article follows the Canadian artist and filmmaker’s practice as it evolved through her engagement with the New York film avant-garde of the 1960s. Through an analysis of Wieland’s collaboration with Shirley Clarke, I will also discuss Pierre Vallières in relation to US-American documentary practices from the same period. Referring to Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967) with its focus on the spoken word as well as Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests , I will place Wieland’s film within this line of film portraits engaging with identity and a performative notion of subjectivity. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze, this article concludes with a close reading of Wieland’s film, discussing her use of the close-up as a means of thwarting the linear narrative and logic of its subject’s political speech. Pierre Vallières ’ politics thus emerges within an aesthetics that crosses the boundaries of documentary and avant-garde, communicating with audiences beyond the film’s original context of French-Canadian emancipation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".