"Breathtaking in its techniques, rhapsodic in its passion, and encyclopedic in its scope, the film traces the long fall from paradise into modern barbarism." - Art Gallery of Ontario
Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World belongs to a 35-hour film cycle, The Book of All the Dead, which comprises the bulk of Toronto-based Bruce Elder’s filmmaking from 1975 to 1994. In ancient Egyptian culture, the Book of the Dead consisted of religious texts intended to help preserve the...
Bruce Elder's Consolations picks up where Lamentations left off in the purgatory of modern existence, and aspires to regain, and reaffirm, a sense of meaning, goodness, beauty and mystery in the empty simulacra of the dead world. A philosophical meditation on everything from language to...
In 1933, at age 33, Harry Alan Potamkin died of complications related to starvation, at a time when he was one of the world's most respected film critics. In his writings, he advocated for a cinema that would simultaneously embrace the fractures and polyphony of modern life and the equitable social...
A Man Whose Life Was Full of Woe Has Been Surprised by Joy
31997HD
Elder depicts forms of life that have grown increasingly out of touch with the body, and attempts to elicit and experience of the delight that results from reconnecting with our natural being
Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time) Part 3: The Body and the World
01988HD
"Elder's most philosophical film ... subtly woven connections ... proceed under a contemplative regime" that "solicits the memories of the whole cycle in more delicate ways." Bart Testa
Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World, Part 1: The Dream of the Last Historian
01985HD
Like Ezekiel's vision in the valley of the dry bones, a typos of a new beginning. In among all the feelings of loss and deprivation there occur intimations of final culbute général, of the dissolution of time, of a now that vanishes between the no long and the not yet.
"a revelation of the editing process ... done with remarkable care and precision ... The interrelationship between moving body and moving camera is heightened to the intensity of a struggle." Joyce Nelson
Return to Nature! The True Natural Method of Healing and Living and the True Salvation of the Soul: Paradise Regained—The Core of the Body—Water, Human Curative Power, Light, Air, Earth, Food, Fruit Culture
A beggar imagines himself sitting at the edge of a maelstrom, looking inward at a vortex, observing beings – demonic forms, ghosts, animals, humans – first rising, and then falling through the vortex: all of them, he realizes have the character they do because of his evanescent mental states....
MICHAEL SNOW UP CLOSE was produced on the occasion of The Michael Snow Project, a major, career-spanning, multi-venue retrospective of the artist. The documentary celebrates the multi-faceted shape of Snow's creative genius, including glimpses of his work in painting, sculpture, film, photo-works,...
A compelling and revealing exploration of one person's psyche in crisis.... The film is a screen diary of a man in his early 30s afflicted with a life-threatening disease, a man confronting his own mortality.
A hybrid of analogue and digital techniques in which chemical transformations of the image are combined with electrical modifications to produce a fantasia of vibrantly coloured alchemical forms that suggest an erotic wonder at all the world’s surfaces.
Powerful and raw, ‘Crack, Brutal Grief’ is an impressive extension of R. Bruce Elder's obsessions with history, media culture, psychology, technology, and the cruelty found in nature. The film acts as a primal scream, literally and metaphorically. The point of departure for the film came...
