R. Bruce Elder
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R. Bruce Elder (b. June 12, 1947) is a Canadian filmmaker and critic. He currently directs the Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture at York University[1]
R. Bruce Elder is an artist, making personal films, and an art critic and art theorist. Nearly all the artistic works that he produced in the first twenty years of his artistic career belong to a single, extended work, a long film cycle of 42 hours duration, called The Book of All the Dead (and, though the individual chapters of that work are usually exhibited separately, it is best seen when the sections are shown in order, over three days). That work is based on Dante’s Commedia and Pound’s Cantos. Parts have been screened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and The Millennium Film Workshop, Berlin’s Kino Arsensal, Paris’ Centre Pompidou, the San Francisco Cinematheque, Los Angeles’ Film Forum, Stadtfilmmuseum München, and Hamburg’s Kino Metropolis. Retrospectives of his work, including screenings of the complete The Book of All of All the Dead have been presented by Anthology Film Archives (NYC), the Art Gallery of Ontario, La Cinématheque Québecoise, Il Festival Senzatitolo (Trento), Images ‘97 (Toronto) the Antechamber (Regina), the University of Western Ontario (London, Ontario) and Cinematheque Ontario. Films in this cycle have won several awards, including a Genie award for the best experimental film made in Canada in 1975 and the Los Angeles Film Critics Award for the best experimental film shown in that city in 1980 and he has had grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Social Sciences and Humanties Research Council of Canada. Since 1997, he has worked on a new cycle of films, titled The Book of Praise, which was spotlighted by Paris’ Festival des Cinémas Différentsin December, 2005.
R. Bruce Elder has worked in the fields of art theory and art criticism (and especially, the theory and criticism of cinema). The work he has done in this area has a wide scope, for although much of his writing has concerned individual filmmakers, or even single films, he has devoted his efforts to placing the artists or works against a cultural background and to showing conversely how certain cultural formations have manifested themselves in different artistic media. Over the past 25 years, he has published articles on film, literary criticism, philosophy, and music. His 1981 article, “Image: Representation and Object” became a key moment in the effort to identify the distinctive features of the Canadian cinema, and especially, the Canadian avant-garde cinema. His manifesto “The Cinema We Need” (1984) touched off a storm of debate; now the issues that it raised are central to the discussion of Canadian culture – it has become a basic point of reference in debates around Canadian cinema, and it even has formed the basis of college and university courses on Canadian film. He has published dozens of articles – on electronic music, painting, film, photography, social theory, literature and philosophy. He is also the author of a key text on Canadian culture and avant-garde film, entitled Image & Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture. In 1989, he published a catalogue (The Body in Film) for an exhibition he assembled for the Art Gallery of Ontario; the appearance of this catalogue and exhibition marked a turn in his interests, away from issues around national (Canadian) cinema and towards the body, which he treats as a potential source of primal experience – similar concerns had become evident in his film work in the mid-1980s.
He has given guest lectures at many universities, film centres and galleries, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Canada. He is a freelance curator and has been involved with the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (which he helped found), the Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Centre, the Film Studies Association of Canada and The Funnel Experimental Film Theatre.
In the mid 1990s, he contributed three catalogue articles to the Art Gallery of Ontario’s massive Michael Snow retrospective; in 1997, he published A Body of Vision, a book which looks at representations of the body in poetry and avant-garde film, and in 1998 brought out The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Charles Olson. He has received grants for writing and publication from the Canadian Federation of the Humanities and The Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada in support of this work, most recently a three-year grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to work on the topic of the cinema’s relation to artistic movements of the twentieth century; a principal aspect of this research is the hidden role that the esoteric movement has played in the fostering of new technologies and creating a climate of enthusiasm for them. Mr. Elder has also been a guest of the German government, to meet with German filmmakers and film historians. He has given guest lectures and served as a panel member at many universities, film centres and galleries, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Canada, on a variety of topics.
Elder was an early user of digital image processing techniques in filmmaking; his interest in the mathematics of signal processing led him to study and to publish on computer programming and artificial intelligence. He was awarded a Council/NSERC New Media Initiatives grant, a Ryerson Research Chair, and a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to develop and apply innovative methods in image processing and machine learning to filmmaking. Elder has done curated exhibitions of experimental films for the Toronto International Film Festival, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Canadian Images Film Festival, and Canada House (London, England) and the Fourth International Experimental Film Congress. He organized the experimental film section for the OKanada exhibition at Berlin’s Akademie der Künste, the largest exhibition of Canadian art ever mounted abroad.
In 2007, Elder was awared a Governor-General's Award in Visual and Media Arts, the highest award in Canada in those fields, for lifetime achievement in the creative arts, and was maded a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Contents |
[edit] Film
Elder's works include:[2]
The Book of All the Dead: Region 1 -- The System of Dante's Hell Films:
Breath/Light/Birth (1975) 6 minutes
Permutations and Combinations (1976) 8 minutes
The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1979) 55 minutes
1857 (Fool's Gold) (1981) 25 minutes
Illuminated Texts (1982) 180 minutes
She is Away (1976) 13 minutes
Lamentations: A Monument To The Dead World
Part 1: The Dream of The Last Historian (1985) 195 minutes
Trace (1980) 20 secs
Lamentations: A Momument to The Dead World
Part 2: The Sublime Calculation (1985) 240 minutes
The Book of All the Dead: Region 2 -- Consolations (Love is an Art of Time)
Consolations (Love is an Art of Time)
Part 1: The Fugitive Gods (1988) 220 minutes
Consolations (Love is an Art of Time)
Part 2: The Lighted Clearing (1988) 220 minutes
Sweet Love Remembered (1976) 12 minutes
Consolations (Love is an Art of Time)
Part 3: The Body and the World (1988) 240 minutes
Barbara is a Vision of Loveliness (1976) 8 minutes
The Book of All the Dead: Region 3 -- Exultations (In Light of the Great Giving)
Flesh Angels (1990) 110 minutes
Newton and Me (1990) 110 minutes
Azure Serene: Mountains, Rivers, Sea, and Sky (1992) 95 minutes
Look! We Have Come Through! (1978) 12 minutes
Exultations: In Light of the Great Giving (1993) 90 minutes
Burying the Dead: Into the Light (1993) 90 minutes
Et Resurrectus Est (1994) 135 minutes
The Book of Praise
A Man whose Life was Full of Woe has been Surprised by Joy (1997) 100 minutes
Crack, Brutal Grief (2001) 122 minutes
Eros and Wonder (2003) 106 minutes
Infunde Lumen Cordibus (2004) 20 minutes
The Young Prince (2007) 123 minutes
[edit] Criticism
Elder's writings include:[3]
- Image and Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture (1989)
- The Body in Film (1989)
- A Body of Vision: Representations of the Body in Recent Film and Poetry (1997)
- The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition (1999)
[edit] References
- ^ Ryerson Polytechnic Faculty Page retrieved 20 Apr 2008
- ^ The Film Reference Library ret. 20 Apr 2008
- ^ The Film Reference Library ret. 20 Apr 2008
- R. Bruce Elder, "Driftworks, Pulseworks, Lightworks: The Letter to Dr. Henderson" in James Miller, ed., Dante & the Orthodox: The Aesthetics of Transgress. (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier Univesity Press), 2005: 450-488
- R. Bruce Elder, On the Foreignness of the Intimate: The Violence and Charity of Perception,” in Atom Egoyan and Ian Balfour’s Subtitles (MIT Press, 2004)
[edit] External links
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