Patriotism, Part I

Directed by Joyce Wieland

Canada, 1964 (experimental, 4 minutes, colour)

Also known as "Patriotism 1"

Image: © Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre

Film Description:
"[Joyce] Wieland's kinetic romp [Patriotism, Part I] casts David Shackman as an overexposed sleeper dogged by a patriotic march of tube steaks that finally refigures him as our most familiar icon of freedom."
-- Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (source)

(sources)

Quotes about Patriotism, Part I

"Patriotism, Part One depicts an army of phallic, bun-clad wieners marching on a vulnerable sleeping white male body, naked save for a sheet. [...] In this light-hearted, and by early twenty-first-century standards hackneyed, allegory of US neo-imperialism, the hot dog is not just a sign of US culture passively consumed by Canadians, but rather a phallic sign of a penetrating US multinational capitalism."
-- Christopher Gittings (source)

"[Joyce] Wieland once called this her 'hot dog film' and downplayed it as a 'technically bad' experiment in animation. But as an early product of her New York years (1963-71, during which Wieland says she became increasingly politicized as a Canadian nationalist and as a woman faced with the often overt sexism of her male colleagues in the avant-garde), the film gestures toward a view of the male body as a complex, vulnerable site, criss-crossed by power and inscribed with the marks of gendered national identity."
-- Lee Parpart (source)

Bibliography for Patriotism, Part I

Brief Sections of Books

Gittings, Christopher E. Canadian National Cinema: Ideology, Difference and Representation. London: Routledge, 2002. (pp. 106-107)
Parpart, Lee. "Cowards, Bullies, and Cadavers: Feminist Re-Mappings of the Passive Male Body in English-Canadian and Québécois Cinema." In Gendering the Nation: Canadian Women's Cinema, edited by Kay Armatage, Kass Banning, Brenda Longfellow, and Janine Marchessault. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. (pp. 256-259)

Dissertation Chapters

Parpart, Lee Anne. "Tube Steaks and Tiny Men, or Feminist Remappings of the Colonial Male Body in Patriotism I and II and La Vie Rêvée." In "Nostalgic Nationalisms and the Spectacle of the Male Body in Canadian and Québécois Cinema," 78-125. M.F.A. diss., York University, 1997.