Reason Over Passion (1969)
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.
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The point here is that we have an exercise of some purity in visual grammar while left alone to decide our level of engagement. It starts helter skelter, like an amateur is filming bits and pieces of their vacation across Canada, but gradually gets interesting by segueing into a rhythm of percussive movement. Again bits and pieces but now vanishing and coalescing out of sight in some abstract pattern. We go where the road takes us, and only get to glance out the window. The pattern again means nothing beyond the movement. There is no story, which is just as well. Without any dramatic distraction, we're free to submerge in just the images. Presumably our point of entry here is that we're meant to puzzle over the title. Do we reason with this as suggested? Do we passionately reason? My own approach is what I cultivate in my practice of meditation. So how to reason over passion - passion being a distortion, and reason meaning something other than thought - so that we unveil a world as it simply comes into being? A real world that is not our projection. The filmmaker craftily makes this a forbidding venture. We're given a world that is hypnotic but dissonant and with no stillness. So we have to work from our end to balance, just like when sitting down to meditate. We have to be still, passionless. We have to watch and watch without attachment to the whole shifting shape swirling before us.Maybe you will come up with your own. My girlfriend had a lucid dream while watching. She dreamed of a man being continuously dislocated inside a frame that is continuously shifting shape.