Films, Writing by me, Documents about my Films and Writing,
Press Clippings, Film Stills, Event Publicity, and Sundries.
Since 1975, R. Bruce Elder has been building two formidable bodies of work, as an artist working in the experimental tradition, and as an author of critical texts on art and cinema. His artistic achievements were recognized in 2007 with a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, Canada’s most prestigious award in those field, and was elected to the Royal Society of Canada. Jonas Mekas, founder of the New York Filmmakers Co-op and principle visionary of the American avant-garde cinema, has dubbed him “the most important North American avant-garde filmmaker to emerge during the 1980s.” Something similar could be said of Elder’s monumental works of art criticism. His role as an author has in recent years assumed the task of charting the relationship between cinema and art movements through the twentieth century, as we see in his recent book, DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect, his previous, Harmony & Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century, and the forthcoming Cubism and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect. In 2009, he received the Robert Motherwell Book Award from the Dedalus Foundation for Harmony + Dissent
Raised in Hamilton and Burlington, Ontario, Elder began his critical and creative work while an undergraduate student in philosophy at McMaster University in the late 1960s. There he learned from the celebrated political philosopher George P. Grant, who introduced Heidegger’s discourse on technology to a generation of Canadian poets and thinkers and whose thoughts on nationhood, love, and technology would inform Elder’s work as an artist and writer.
Alone (All Flesh Shall See It Together) (forthcoming, 2018)