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R. Bruce Elder - Film Reference Library
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THE BOOK OF ALL THE DEAD FILM SELECTION
R. BRUCE ELDER’S THE BOOK OF ALL THE DEAD

“Elder’s work is without equal in the history of cinema. At a time when nearly all cultural statements partake of the moral and cultural relativism of the post-modern experience, in his films as in his writings, Elder champions and recreates with extreme courage the profound questionings of the European philosophical tradition. In this way his work is intensely Canadian.” - Peter Harcourt


In 2007, R. Bruce Elder received a Governor General’s Award for Media Arts for his educational, critical, and creative contributions to experimental cinema. This recognition warrants a fresh look at Elder’s first film cycle, not seen in its entirety in Toronto in more than a decade. Gathering films made between 1975 and 1994, the forty-two-hour-long OF ALL THE DEAD may be the most ambitious work in its medium, an epic of Biblical proportions and structure, in the same league as the towering achievements on which it is modelled -Dante’s Divine Comedy, Pound’s Cantos, Wagner’s Ring.

This poetic meditation on modern history from the perspective of its endpoint in technological nihilism aims to wean viewers away from the instrumental rationality enshrined in narrative forms, so as to rekindle more embodied -and thus more spiritual -modes of awareness of “being-in-the-world.” 1Elder’s films are therefore designed to frustrate the conceptual mind’s habitual reliance on univocal frameworks, wearing it down to induce instead a willing surrender before a barrage of elements that “operate[s] on various scales -from the personal, to the historical, to the philosophical, to the anagogic. . . . When such various particulars are combined and recombined in shifting juxtapositions, meaning is generated, because the form encourages people to discover likenesses among dissimilar and unexpected things” (R. Bruce Elder). -Christian Roy

Christian Roy is a cultural historian, a translator, and a board member of the Darling Foundry contemporary art centre in Old Montreal. He has written several texts on Elder’s work.

These screenings are co-presented with Ryerson University, The Images Festival and the Canadian Filmmakers’ Distribution Centre, and will be accompanied by an interpretive text by Christian Roy which will
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THE TERRORIZER
THE BOOK OF ALL THE DEAD - PART ONE: THE SYSTEM OF DANTE’S HELL
THE BOOK OF ALL THE DEAD - PART ONE: THE SYSTEM OF DANTE’S HELL - CONT'D
THE BOOK OF ALL THE DEAD - PART ONE: THE SYSTEM OF DANTE’S HELL - CONT'D
THE BOOK OF ALL THE DEAD - PART ONE: THE SYSTEM OF DANTE’S HELL - CONT'D
THE BOOK OF ALL THE DEAD - PART THREE: EXULTATIONS (IN LIGHT OF THE GREAT GIVING)
THE BOOK OF ALL THE DEAD - PART THREE: EXULTATIONS (IN LIGHT OF THE GREAT GIVING) - CONT'D
THE BOOK OF ALL THE DEAD - PART THREE: EXULTATIONS (IN LIGHT OF THE GREAT GIVING) - CONT'D
THE BOOK OF ALL THE DEAD - PART THREE: EXULTATIONS (IN LIGHT OF THE GREAT GIVING) - CONT'D
THE BOOK OF ALL THE DEAD - PART THREE: EXULTATIONS (IN LIGHT OF THE GREAT GIVING) - CONT'D
THE BOOK OF ALL THE DEAD - PART THREE: EXULTATIONS (IN LIGHT OF THE GREAT GIVING) - CONT'D
THE BOOK OF ALL THE DEAD - PART TWO: CONSOLATIONS (LOVE IS AN ART OF TIME)
THE BOOK OF ALL THE DEAD - PART TWO: CONSOLATIONS (LOVE IS AN ART OF TIME) - CONT'D
THE BOOK OF ALL THE DEAD - PART TWO: CONSOLATIONS (LOVE IS AN ART OF TIME) - CONT'D
 
             
 
 
 
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