Movies: R. Bruce Elder

Bruce Elder's Consolations picks up where Lamentations left off in the purgatory of modern existence, and aspires to regain, and reaffirm, a sense of meaning, goodness, beauty and mystery in the empty simulacra of the dead world. A philosophical medi...

"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...

Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World belongs to a 35-hour film cycle, The Book of All the Dead, which comprises the bulk of Toronto-based Bruce Elder’s filmmaking from 1975 to 1994. In ancient Egyptian culture, the Book of the Dead consisted of...

MICHAEL SNOW UP CLOSE was produced on the occasion of The Michael Snow Project, a major, career-spanning, multi-venue retrospective of the artist. The documentary celebrates the multi-faceted shape of Snow's creative genius, including glimpses of his...

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. T...

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 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....

This 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....

"Behold, I show you a mystery. Not everyone shall sleep, but everyone shall be changed."...

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. (RBE)...

"The film was made using principles derived from Stephen Wolfram’s work on cellular automata (A New Kind of Science) to determine the content or colour of the shots, their duration, and the time of their appearance: the palette of effects, and their...

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...

In 1933, at age 33, Harry Alan Potamkin died of complications related to starvation, at a time when he was one of the world's most respected film critics. In his writings, he advocated for a cinema that would simultaneously embrace the fractures and ...

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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 ...

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 (to...

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Like 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 lo...

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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 surfac...