R. Bruce Elder
Biography
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. His artistic achievements were recognized in 2007 with a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, Canada’s most prestigious award in those field, and was elected to the Royal Society of Canada. Jonas Mekas, founder of the New York Filmmakers Co-op and principle visionary of the American avant-garde cinema, has dubbed him “the most important North American avant-garde filmmaker to emerge during the 1980s.” Something similar could be said of Elder’s monumental works of art criticism. His role as an author has in recent years assumed the task of charting the relationship between cinema and art movements through the twentieth century, as we see in his recent book, DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect, his previous, Harmony & Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century, and the forthcoming Cubism and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect. In 2009, he received the Robert Motherwell Book Award from the Dedalus Foundation for Harmony + Dissent.
Known For & Full Filmography7 Titles
Movie - 1982, 2h 15m • as Professor
"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
Movie - 1996, 2h 15m • as Himself
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 work in painting, sculpture, film, photo-works, performance, installations, and holography. Discussions with Snow, original documentation of his music and performance work, and excerpts from his avant-garde films, are complemented by interviews with filmmakers Jonas Mekas and Bruce Elder, Snow's dealer Av Isaacs, the architect Eb Zeidler, museum director Pierre Théberge, curator Louise Dompierre, and others. A deliberately conventional documentary about a deliberately unconventional artist.
Movie - 1979, 2h 15m • Main Cast Role
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.
Movie - 1988, 2h 15m • Main Cast Role
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 meditation on everything from language to consciousness and aesthetics to morality, Consolations is a gargantuan achievement and a key part in Elder's The Book of All the Dead cycle, inspired by Alighieri's Commedia and Pound's Cantos.
Movie - 1988, 2h 15m • Main Cast Role
"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
Movie - 1997, 2h 15m • Main Cast Role
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
Movie - 1988, 2h 15m • Main Cast Role
"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