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.
Audience Award, Montreal Poetry Film Festival Honorable Mention, San Francisco Poetry Film Festival
"an act of celebration ... He produces -- with light and colour, sound, stillness and movement -- the ineluctable rhythm and energy of the natural world." Carole Zucker
"Breathtaking in its techniques, rhapsodic in its passion, and encyclopedia in its scope, the film traces the long fall from paradise into modern barbarism." Art Gallery of Ontario
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."
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.
Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time) Part 1: The Fugitive Gods
"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
"Elder is on the right track, the only track, despite the overbearing length, is harmonious, lucid and emotional." Helen Knode
Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time) Part 2: The Lighted Clearing
"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
"Elder is on the right track, the only track, despite the overbearing length, is harmonious, lucid and emotional." Helen Knode
Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time) Part 3: The Body and the World
"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
"Elder is on the right track, the only track, despite the overbearing length, is harmonious, lucid and emotional." Helen Knode
"A beatific vision of the imaginary landscape of paradise, inspired by the poetry of ... Blake." Pacific Cinematheque
"the latest image technology and exotic computer mathematics like fractals and cellular automata rhym[ed] ... with Dante's medieval cosmology ... a heady blend of the high-tech and the antique ... that dazzles the eye." Bart Testa
"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
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, or primary substance"; the second substance disseminated through the first, is light.
"Inspired by the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, Louis Zukofsky and Ezra Pound ... Elder's latest film .. is a visually lush collage," and "ironic attempt to construct a Divine Comedy for modern times." Jim Shedden
Moves toward the vision of time when Heaven descends to earth and makes all earth one with Heaven ... when the outside becomes as inside, and the inside as the outside; when the male and the female become one and the same ... when the end returns to the beginning and the beginning finds completion in the end.
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.
A Man Whose Life Was Full of Woe Has Been Surprised By Joy
"Having recently completed his monumental film cycle, 'The Book of All the Dead,' Elder begins a new cycle - 'The Book Of Praise' - with 'A Man Whose Life Was Full of Woe Has Been Surprised by Joy.' Elder believes that, by using speed and by creating constructions which incorporate a number of attractions that contend with each other for attention, a filmmaker can produce a form of experience that bypasses the intellect and goes straight to the body and the senses. Accordingly, he creates dense, elaborate films that make use of intricate montage construction, complex collage (combining simultaneous multiple images) and layered sound construction. In his new film, 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."
- Cinematheque Ontario, March 1998.
“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 shortly after the gruesome suicide of Elder's close friend.
(Sound by Greg Boa and Alex Geddie)
“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.”
-Cinematheque Ontario
“INFUNDE LUMEN CORDIBUS was made using principles derived from Stephen Wolfram’s work on cellular automata (‘A New Kind of Science’) to determine the content and colour of the shots, their duration, and the time of their appearance: the palette of effects, and their rhythmical development... is entirely the result of computational processes that model natural events. John Cage instructed us that art should imitate nature in its manner of operation; I have tried to take the lesson. The music was composed, using related principles, by Colin Clark with the assistance of Josh Thorpe” (R. Bruce Elder). The film’s title translates as “Flood my heart with light” and is best known from a hymn, ascribed to St. Ambrose, used for Sunday Vespers.
(Assisted by Erika Loic, Alla Gadassik, Ajla Odobasic et al.) 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. What is seen is never made of anything but imagination. Beyond that lies nothingness.
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 our own).
Return to Nature! The True Natural Method Of Healing and Living...
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
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