Collection
The Book of All the Dead
The Book of All the Dead, R. Bruce Elder's 42-hour-long first cycle, gathers films he made between 1975 and 1994.
Timeline
- 1
Breath/Light/Birth1/1/19756m 0.0Video 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.
- 2
She Is Away1/1/197513m 0.0"evokes absence through elliptical continuity and loneliness through the repetition of ... archetypal images" Ian Birnie
- 3
Permutations and Combinations1/27/19768m 0.0A 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.
- 4
Barbara is a Vision of Loveliness12/14/19768m 0.0The optical manipulation of tone, shape, line and movement creates a purely cinematic choreography.
- 5
Look! We Have Come Through!1/30/197811m 0.0"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
- 6
The Art of Worldly Wisdom6/7/197955m 7.2A 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.
- 7
Sweet Love Remembered1/27/198014m 6.7Inspired 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."
- 8
- 9
1857 (Fool's Gold)1/26/198125m 7.7This 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.
- 10
Illuminated Texts1/27/19822h 54m 7.3"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
- 11
Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World, Part 1: The Dream of the Last Historian10/10/19853h 21m 0.0Like 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.
- 12
Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World, Part 2: The Sublime Calculation10/11/19854h 0m 0.0 - 13
Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time) Part 1: The Fugitive Gods1/27/19884h 28m 0.0"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
- 14
Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time) Part 2: The Lighted Clearing1/27/19884h 41m 0.0"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
- 15
Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time) Part 3: The Body and the World1/27/19884h 36m 9.0"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
- 16
Flesh Angels1/27/19901h 50m 7.0"A beatific vision of the imaginary landscape of paradise, inspired by the poetry of ... Blake." Pacific Cinematheque
- 17
Newton and Me3/2/19911h 50m 0.0Newton 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.
- 18
Azure Serene2/20/19921h 35m 0.0"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
- 19
Exultations: In Light of the Great Giving10/24/19931h 30m 0.0The titular film of region three of Elder's Book of All the Dead
- 20
Burying the Dead (Into the Light)11/21/19931h 35m 8.0The 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. (RBE)
- 21
Et Resurrectus Est1/30/19942h 15m 7.0"Behold, I show you a mystery. Not everyone shall sleep, but everyone shall be changed."