Image and Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture
(What do images of the body, which recent poets and filmma...)
What do images of the body, which recent poets and filmmakers have given us, tell us about ourselves, about the way we think, and about the culture in which we live? In his new book A Body of Vision, R. Bruce Elder situates contemporary poetic and cinematic body images in their cultural context. Elder examines how recent artists have tried to recognize and to convey primordial forms of experiences. He proposes the daring thesis that in their efforts to do so, artists have resorted to gnostic models of consciousness. He argues that the attempt to convey these primordial modes of awareness demands a different conception of artistic meaning from any of those that currently dominate the contemporary critical discussion.
(This book deals with the early intellectual reception of ...)
This book deals with the early intellectual reception of the cinema and the manner in which art theorists, philosophers, cultural theorists, and especially artists of the first decades of the twentieth century responded to its advent. While the idea persists that early writers on film were troubled by the cinema’s lowly form, this work proposes that there was another, largely unrecognized, strain in the reception of it. Far from anxious about film’s provenance in popular entertainment, some writers and artists proclaimed that the cinema was the most important art for the moderns, as it exemplified the vibrancy of contemporary life. This view of the cinema was especially common among those whose commitments were to advanced artistic practices. Their notions about how to recast the art media (or the forms forged from those media’s materials) and the urgency of doing so formed the principal part of the conceptual core of the artistic programs advanced by the vanguard art movements of the first half of the twentieth century.
Cubism and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect
(Cubism and futurism were closely related movements that v...)
Cubism and futurism were closely related movements that vied with each other in the economy of renown. Perception, dynamism, and the dynamism of perception — these were the issues that passed back and forth between the two. Cubism and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect shows how movement became, in the traditional visual arts, a central factor with the advent of the cinema: gone were the days when an artwork strived merely to lift experience out the realm of change and flow. The cinema at this time was understood as an electric art, akin to X-rays, coloured light, and sonic energy. In this book, celebrated filmmaker and author Bruce Elder connects the dynamism that the cinema made an essential feature of the new artwork to the new science of electromagnetism.
Richard Bruce Elder is an internationally renowned avant-garde filmmaker, scholar, and writer. He is famous for The Art of Worldly Wisdom, Lamentations: a Monument for the Dead World, and Eros and Wonder.
Background
Richard Bruce Elder was born on June 12, 1947, in Hawkesbury, Ontario, Canada to the family of David Murdoch and Edrie M. (Campbell) Elder. When the boy was around six years old, the family moved to Westdale where his mother had grown up. During his childhood, Westdale was known as the businessman's district of the steel-making city of Hamilton. Elder's paternal grandfather, who played a significant role in young Bruce's life, lived in the east end, on Balmoral Avenue.
Once his grandfather arrived in Hamilton, he got a job as a plumber. Bruce admired his grandfather for his craftsman’s skills, and his ability to repair just about anything. Elder credits his grandfather for instilling in him pride about technical processes, and this transferred to his pride in pushing and bending the technical processes of filmmaking.
Education
Richard Bruce Elder attended McMaster University, and, still being an undergraduate, he entered McMaster’s art community. Thus, in the late 1960s, Elder began his critical and creative work.
In 1969, when he received a bachelor's degree, Elder joined the University of Toronto. He also attended Ryerson Polytechnic University.
Before taking on the full-time career of a filmmaker, Elder worked as a lecturer at Ryerson Polytechnic University. Nonetheless today he's mainly in film industry, Elder continues his academic life teaching both at Ryerson and York University.
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. A prolific filmmaker, he has made over sixty hours of films, which have been screened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Millennium Film Workshop, Berlin’s Kino Arsenal, Paris’s Centre Pompidou, the San Francisco Cinematheque, Atlanta’s High Museum, Los Angeles Film Forum, Stadtfilmmuseum München, Hamburg’s Kino Metropolis, and Barcelona’s Centre de Cultura Contemporània.
In 1994, Elder completed his first large film cycle, The Book of All the Dead, and in 1997, a screening of the entire forty-six-hour work was mounted at Images Film and Video Festival (Toronto).
With the completion of The Book of All the Dead in the mid-90s, Elder assumed a new cycle, The Book of Praise. He identifies this cycle as a Protestant work, a shift away from a Catholic sensibility that had been primary to The Book of All the Dead, a shift away from wonder at the world created, toward the wonders of our interior being. Elder has written that The Book of Praise deals with the transformative properties of eros, image, history, montage, and self. It is through this theme of transformation that The Book of Praise takes on alchemistic qualities, meditating on symbol and color to bring forth a higher self, in an echo of the alchemist’s project to transmute base metal into gold. To date, this body of work contains six completed feature-length films and one shorter work.
In 2007, Elder was elected a member of the Royal Society of Canada and received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, the most prestigious Canadian award in this field.
The jury for the latter award described him as "highly innovative," "influential," and "acutely intelligent," noting the enormous span of his practice and the demanding nature of his films.
(Cubism and futurism were closely related movements that v...)
2018
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Quotations:
"My body of work comprises three components. First, there is the creative film work - films that belong to the avantgarde tradition. Second, there is the writing, principally on film and its place in culture, but it includes as well philosophical articles on modernity and the place of art in the culture of modernity. Third, there are philosophical tracts on art and creativity. The division of my work into these creative and philosophical components highlights a tension with which all my work deals. I believe that modernity has seen the spiritual disenfranchisement of the modes of experience that the strongest and most enduring art provokes. So, along with efforts to produce artworks, I have attempted to formulate a philosophical defense of the importance of art."
"My writing is inspired by the conviction that modernity has reduced experience to its nadir. In my work I explore the possibility of reanimating modes of experience that modernity has disenfranchised. The cost of failing to acknowledge these repudiated modes of experience. 1 believe, is that we fail to understand a dimension of our being, and that we are therefore alienated from part of ourselves - and that carries with it the threat that this unknown and repudiated part will come to dominate us."
"Working in the area where philosophy, aesthetics, media studies, and cultural studies intersect gives my work a synthetic quality. I draw from a wide range of philosophical writings and press them into the service of forming an understanding of avant-garde art. And I write about art as one who has an understanding of art-making."
Membership
Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers
Association for Computing Machinery
Film Studies Association of Canada
Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Centre
Writers Union of Canada
Northeast Modern Language Association
Canyon Cinema Cooperative
Personality
Elder combines images, music, and text to create works that reflect his interest in philosophy, technology, science, spirituality, and the human body, themes reflected equally strongly in his equally voluminous writings.
Quotes from others about the person
Jonas Mekas, founder of the New York Filmmakers Co-op and principle visionary of the American avant-garde cinema, claimed that Elder was "the most important North American avant-garde filmmaker in the 1980s."
Interests
Wine tastings, wine appreciation, West African drumming, Middle Eastern drumming
Writers
Dante, Ezra Pound
Connections
On September 4, 1970, Elder married Kathryn Florence LeRoy.
