R. Bruce Elder

Alone: All Flesh Shall See It Together (2024)

Potamkin (2017)

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 polyph ...

A Gathering of Crystals (2015)

What Troubles the Peace at Brandenburg? (2011)

All about red and green in time. Very much inspired by the work of Count Hermann Puckler-Muskau, Adolf Just and, above all, Gerhard Richter. A mnemotechnic and threnody for the infirm of Brandenburg an der Havel and environs during a time of hate (too like ...

The Young Prince (2007)

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 ...

Infunde Lumen Cordibus (2004)

"The film was made using principles derived from Stephen Wolfram's work on cellular automata (A New Kind of Science) to determine the content or colour of the shots, their duration, and the time of their appearance: the palette of effects, and their rhyth ...

Eros and Wonder (2003)

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. ...

Crack, Brutal Grief (2000)

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 poin ...

A Man Whose Life Was Full of Woe Has Been Surprised by Joy (1997)

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 ...

Et Resurrectus Est (1994)

"Behold, I show you a mystery. Not everyone shall sleep, but everyone shall be changed. ...

Burying the Dead (Into the Light) (1993)

The confrontation with death and finitude....Death animates the sense of the intimacy of life whose measureless flow is a danger to the stability of things. ...

Exultations: In Light of the Great Giving (1993)

The titular film of region three of Elder's Book of All the Dead ...

Newton and Me (1991)

Newton was the greatest of all the natural magicians, learned in matters musical, theological and in Apocalyptic literature. He believed bodies were composed of "certain aetheral spirits or vapours"; one ... is the ether, "the succus nutritius of the earth ...

Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time) Part 1: The Fugitive Gods (1988)

"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. ...

Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time) Part 2: The Lighted Clearing (1988)

"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. ...

Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time) Part 3: The Body and the World (1988)

"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. ...

Consolations (Love is an Art of Time) (1988)

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 ...

Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World, Part 2: The Sublime Calculation (1985)

The antitype. Towards origins. Finding the beginning in the end. In the end - in that tremendous Vulgate phrase - ludens in orbe terrarum. ...

Lamentations: A Monument for the Dead World (1985)

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 relig ...

Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World, Part 1: The Dream of the Last Historian (1985)

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 a ...

Illuminated Texts (1982)

"Breathtaking in its techniques, rhapsodic in its passion, and encyclopedic in its scope, the film traces the long fall from paradise into modern barbarism. ...

1857 (Fool's Gold) (1981)

This film is an act of celebration ... He produces -- with light and colour, sound, stillness and movement -- the ineluctable rhythm and energy of the natural world. ...

Trace (1980)

The memory of a nearly perfect evening. ...

Sweet Love Remembered (1980)

Inspired by remarks made by Freud, "Eros nowhere makes its intentions more clear than in the desire to make two things one." and by Nietzsche, "What must these people have suffered to have become this beautiful. ...

The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1979)

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. ...

Look! We Have Come Through! (1978)

"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. ...

Unremitting Tenderness (1977)

Using optical printing techniques with unusual color processing effects, Unremitting Tenderness offers a series of transformations of a dance sequence. The effect Elder seeks is one of "scales falling away from the eyes, layer by layer, as if progressing u ...

Barbara is a Vision of Loveliness (1976)

The optical manipulation of tone, shape, line and movement creates a purely cinematic choreography. ...

Permutations and Combinations (1976)

A close container for chance elements. Together with She Is Away, makes apparent some features of the material form of which the entire cycle would be composed. ...

Breath/Light/Birth (1975)

Video transformations of documentary footage of a woman giving birth, assisted by members of a religious commune. Isolation confronts the communal, the gruesome confronts the holy in this most mysterious of events. ...

A Man Whose Life Was Full of Woe Has Been Surprised by Joy (1997)

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 ...

Michael Snow Up Close (1996)

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 ...

Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time) Part 1: The Fugitive Gods (1988)

"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. ...

Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time) Part 2: The Lighted Clearing (1988)

"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. ...

Consolations (Love is an Art of Time) (1988)

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 ...

Illuminated Texts (1982)

"Breathtaking in its techniques, rhapsodic in its passion, and encyclopedic in its scope, the film traces the long fall from paradise into modern barbarism. ...

The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1979)

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. ...