MAKING LIGHT OF IT

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(From a 1972 screening/Q&A at the Millenium Film Workshop)

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(From The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition... by Bruce Elder)

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(From A Crucible of Document by Marie Nesthus)

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(From the No. 56/57 Spring 1973 issue of Film Culture)

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MacDonald: I saw The Act of Seeing at an early screening, in Binghamton in 1972, and it was a transformative experience for me. You were not there. I was furious after the film and wanted to stand up and scream at the programmers for showing it—but within a few weeks, I was already thinking how it would be exciting and valuable to show the film to my students and to the public audience I was programming for. Am I right that The Act of Seeing has become one of the more popular of your films?
 

Brakhage: Yes. Also, of all the films I've made—and let me preface this by saying that I have always wished that I was not who I am, but the Hans Christian Andersen of film: I would easily give up everything to have been a great children's storyteller (of course, Andersen wanted to be Charles Dickens, so there we go: no one ever gets to be exactly what he wants to be)—this film was the film that our children always asked to see, and that they wanted to bring their friends in to see (I'd have to get permission of the parents, some of whom wouldn't give it). My children have always wanted to see this film, above everything else of my making, and see it over and over.

Children are always trying to figure out how bad things can get, and they love gruesome tales. And there is a fairy-tale quality to that film in a way. To all three of the Pittsburgh films.
 

MacDonald: When I was a kid and encyclopedia salesmen came by, the section of the body were imaged on clear sheets of plastic; you could "enter" the body: skin, the muscles, nerves, organs, bones. So their reaction makes sense to me.
 

Brakhage: The children also accepted the form of the film in a way that some adults haven't been able to. It's a very dark vision and gets darker and darker as it moves along.
 

MacDonald: Though near the end you seem to have a kind of epiphany and become almost a child yourself in the excitement of exploring what seem to me to be landscapes. The camera becomes a plane swooping through these strange formations.
 

Brakhage: Oh, I'm glad for that. To me one thing that saves the film is this little tiny bit of reflected sky that's caught in a little puddle of liquid in the armpit of a corpse—a little blue ephemeral thing that can stand for all of Spirit, which otherwise would be missing.

Also, I think it's funny that at the end a little man in a little bow tie is seen reciting all this horror into a tape recorder. He turns it off, and the film is over. The Act of Seeing is full of jokes like that—it's black humor to be sure, but humor. The fly crawling on a toe. Or the zipping up of the body bag soon after a knife comes down and "unzips" a whole torso. Those moments are there to lighten the load of watching.

(From a Critical Cinema 4 by Scott MacDonald)

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For the next “filmmaker profile” we head back up across the northern border and stand before vast body of work of R. Bruce Elder, one of Canada’s preeminent artists/savants, the recipient of the Governor’s General Award in Media Arts and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.  But of course his worth lies not in institutional recognition, but rather his artistic/scholastic achievements, and Elder’s fortitude in that regard is seemingly inexhaustible.  He created one of the truly monumental works of cinema, his forty-two plus hour Book of All the Dead cycle, in addition to a later ongoing cycle entitled The Book of Praise, as well as having written some of the most difficult, yet rewarding works of critical scholarship I’ve yet encountered, The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition…, A Body of Vision, Harmony and Dissent, which was awarded the Robert Motherwell Book Award (one need only take a glimpse into his past academic pursuits for insight into this phenomenon, having studied everything from philosophy to computer science to dance to music composition).  As is the case with many visionary artists his rise has not been without controversy, his manifesto/essay concerning the then state of Canadian cinema entitled The Cinema We Need, took a deftly worded blowtorch to the critical film establishment of the country, and needless to say ruffled a few feathers.  Nevertheless, there are many who recognize his substantial importance, Stan Brakhage having once remarked “I feel closer to this epic-maker Elder than to any other living film-maker: and yet I feel an aesthetic opposition of such intensity that I'm certain I'll be the rest of my life working Uphill to off-set this grand haunt.”

GENERAL INTRODUCTION:

Elder biography

Elder’s website (click on "Film & Projects" for filmography w/ pics and descriptions)

[filmography]

Breath/Light/Birth (1975)

Barbara Is a Vision of Loveliness (1976)

Permutations and Combinations (1976)

She Is Away (1976)

Unremitting Tenderness (1977)

Look! We Have Come Through! (1978)

 The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1979)

Sweet Love Remembered (1980)

Trace (1980)

"1857" (Fool's Gold) (1981)

Illuminated Texts (1982)

Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World Pt. 1: The Dream of the Last Historian (1985)

Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World Pt. 2: The Sublime Calculation (1985)

Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time) Pt. 1: The Fugitive Gods (1988)

Consolations (Love is An Art of Time) Pt. 2: The Lighted Clearing (1988)

Consolations (Love is An Art of Time) Pt. 3: The Body and the World (1988)

Exultations: In Light of the Great Giving Pt. 1: Flesh Angels (1990)

Exultations: In Light of the Great Giving Pt. 2:Newton and Me (1990)

Exultations ... Pt.3: Azure Serene: Mountains, Rivers, Sea and Sky (1992)
Exultations: In Light of the Great Giving Pt.4: In Light of the Great Giving (1993)
Exultations ... Pt.5: Burying the Dead: Into the Light (1993)
Exultations: In Light of the Great Giving Pt.6: Et Ressurectus Est (1994)
A Man Whose Life Was Full of Woe Has Been Surprised by Joy (1997)
Crack, Brutal, Grief (2001)
Eros and Wonder (2003)

Infunde Lumen Cordibus (2003)

The Young Prince (2007)

WRITINGS BY/ON ELDER: 

The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Bruce Elder  
Bart Testa on 'The Book of All the Dead'  
The Body in Film

A Body of Vision: Representations of the Body in Recent Films and Poetry

The Cinema We Need ('Presence and Absence: The Films of Michael Snow')

Cinematheque Ontario screening of 'The Book of All the Dead'  
Elder Film Index (with pictures and descriptions)  
Elder in “Dante, cinema, and television”

Elder in "Guide to the Cinema(s) of Canada"   
Elder's Maddening Vision (Book Reviews)

Elder on WorldCat Library System   
Essays on Carl Brown (go to 'writings on')  
Essay on Elder  
The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition...

Gnostic Lang  

Harmony and Dissent...
Image and Identity: Reflections of Canadian Film and Culture 
Observations on 'Et Resurrectus Est'  
On “Illuminated Texts” and “1857 (Fool’s Gold)”

Illuminated Texts review 

On Picture (For Stan Brakhage) [Notes on Et Ressurectus Est) 
R. Bruce Elder: In the Realm of Mystery and Wonder

Ryerson University Bio

Stan Brakhage Remembrances  
A Tribute to R. Bruce Elder  

York University Bio 

Canyon Cinema

CFMDC  

York University Library

INTERVIEWS WITH ELDER: 

An interview with R. Bruce Elder

Elder presenting essay (video)

Boy’s Best Friend (2002, Cécile Fontaine)

The Young Prince (2007, R. Bruce Elder)

No. 5 (1998, Olivier Fouchard)

Das Goldene Tor (1992, Jurgen Reble)

Aaeon (1968-70, Al Razutis)

Water Spell (2007, Sandy Ding)

Elephants’ Test (2005, Albert Alcoz)

Removed (1999, Naomi Uman)

Light Work Mood Disorder (2007, Jennifer Reeves)

In truth, list making can often be a fairly arbitrary undertaking, but there is no doubt that it is also an effective manner in which to occupy idle time, and can occasionally provide interesting insight into a person’s sensibilities, so under the guise of conforming to the rites of the rapidly approaching holiday season, I’ll elaborate on the five series (the concept of longer serial works, both cinematically and poetically, absolutely fascinate me) I most desperately wish I could have the chance (or the finances, yet again my main obstacle) to be able to see (I should probably note that I have seen parts of some of these series, but I want the whole thing!):

Consisting of A Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea (1991, photographed), The Mammals of Victoria (1994, photographed w/ hand-painted frames), The God of Day Had Gone Down Upon Him (2000, photographed) and Panels for the Walls of Heaven (2002, hand-painted), this was one of the last major works of Brakhage’s daunting oeuvre, one in which a lifelong mastery of the various tools of cinema were applied to create a solemn mediation on the various stages in the life of his second wife Marilyn (though according to Marilyn herself her relation to the films is slight) located on the landscape of the island of Vancouver and focused heavily on the sea.  A primary source of inspiration for the series was Ronald Johnson’s ARK (in his essay Brakhage wrote that three poets in particular, among them Johnson, “contribute directly to my filmmaking as powerfully as Pound, Stein, Olson, Creeley and Dorn when I was young…”), perhaps my personal favorite of the 20th century long-poems, a work, that like most of Brakhage’s cinema, is full of wonder and visionary lyricism.  In his book The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition, R. Bruce Elder, whose essay Brakhage: Poesis explores some of the relations between the two works, compares the films, in particular A Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea, to the works of Monet at Giverny in their transitory existence, a sentiment echoed by Fred Camper, who writes in an essay Brakhage’s Contradictions that each of them “ are among the hardest to fix in memory.”  Having recently had the opportunity the fall under the spell of the ocean first hand, I eagerly await the opportunity to experience Brakhage’s hymns and return to the lapping waves anew.

(Of course there are many other Brakhage works that could be close-seconds on this list, The Art of Vision, The Song Series, Sincerity/Duplicity series, The Romans/Egyptians/Babylons, Passage Through: A Ritual, the Ellipses, and so on and so forth, you get the idea…)

     Consisting of Huge Pupils (1968), False Pretenses (1974), The Phantom Enthusiast (1976), Charmed Particles (1979), The Lighted Field (1987), Imaginary Light (1994/5), Time Being (2001), Free to Go (Interlude) (2003), and Aberration of Starlight (2008).  Having personally been involved in an ever increasing love-affair with the properties of light, in all its [meta]physical splendor, it is natural that I would be drawn to the work of Noren, who has been delicately illuminating the intricacies of such an infatuation for over four decades.  During that time span Noren has investigated the perpetual daily dance of the particle and wave in color, black and white, and most recently digital, exploiting the subtle visual possibilities of each while traveling on what he terms “the fool’s progress”, collecting wisdom as the illusions of the world around him dissipate and reveal their truths.  As usual augmenting my interest are the poets that Noren has drawn from and been connected to, in particular Louis Zukofsky, whose long-poem A and 80 Flowers are remarkable poetic achievements, whom both possess the ability to express the particulars of their immediate surroundings as ephemeral splendors.    This being on my wish list involves more than just monetary barriers, the first three films in the series are currently entirely out of circulation, the first for apparently unknown reasons (some have speculated Noren’s hindsight apprehension over its frank nature, though in A Critical Cinema 2 Noren denied having any such concerns (it was heavily praised by many significant artists as an major achievement in the cinema of tactility), parts two and three supposedly for re-editing (again weaned from CC2).          

     Consisting of The Illuminated Texts (1982), Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World Pt. 1 & 2 (1985), Consolations (Love is An Art of Time) Pt. 1-3 [Individually Titled](1988), and Exultations: In Light of the Great Giving Pt. 1-6 [Individually Titled](1990-1994), and clocking in at a staggering forty-two hours long, R. Bruce Elder’s aims at a mega-mediation on memory, time, history, and damn near everything in between, and though eventually abandoning it after accepting the impossibility of such a lofty feat, what exists surely seems to be one of the most ambitious creations of the cinema (let alone the avant-garde).  As reflected in the length of his work, Elder is a great admirer of the “epic” or long-form poem, and modeled The Book of All the Dead specifically on Ezra Pound’s The Cantos (a work equally admired by Brakhage, identifying it in an essay on poetry and film as the single most important work in his life), and Dante’s Divine Comedy (of course involving Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, respectively), which naturally piques my interest, and gives insight into some of the thematic and structural techniques that are sure to be employed.  Elder’s fortitude is seemingly inexhaustible, a few years later he embarked on a new cycle entitled The Book of Praise (currently consisting of four films), in addition to writing some of my favorite works of critical scholarship The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition…, and A Body of Vision, as well as Harmony and Dissent (I have not yet completed), which was awarded the Robert Motherwell Book Award.  Also of interest is a manifesto/essay Elder wrote during the cycle concerning Canadian cinema entitled The Cinema We Need which, though I have been unable to track down, apparently took a deftly worded blowtorch to the critical film establishment of the country, and needless to say ruffled a few feathers.

     Consisting of Moxon's Mechanick Exercises, or, The Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing (1999), The Enjoyment of Reading, Lost and Found (2001), Secret History of the Dividing Line (2002), The Great Art of Knowing (2004), Gatten’s biblio-cinematic blending of the spiritual and structural (if you ascribe to such divisions), inspired by a fortuitous encounter with a book written by William Byrd II (who happened to own the largest personal library in eighteenth-century colonial Virginia), gently investigates associations between text and image, past and present, depiction and actuality, and seemingly recapitulates in a relatively humble manner the various technical progressions of cinema.  This is a largely handcrafted labor, Gatten employing a range of delicate processes to bring word to celluloid.  Yet again I’m drawn to a source of poetic association/inspiration, this time Susan Howe, whose works explore many of the same themes on pages filled with elaborate and fascinating textual arrangements.  I had the opportunity to briefly be exposed to his artistry earlier this year in the form of How to Conduct a Love Affair, a film that at the time left me puzzled, but has since carved its way into memory as a work of studious beauty.  It is by all accounts a quietly ambitious undertaking, but one that would seem to have endless possibilities in Gatten’s reverent hands.

     Consisting of over one hundred titles and an astonishing eighty hours, this reworking of Markopoulos’ entire filmic output, though still largely as yet unprinted (Markopoulos died in 1992), promises to be a wondrous monument of cinema, and indeed has been conceived to screen in a location fitting of such distinction.  The Temenos, located in an isolated mountainous area of the Peloponnese, is a “visionary exhibition space”[1] where interested parties journey from near and far to experience the sensuous artistry of both Markopoulos and his long-time partner Robert Beavers in a wholly singular environment.  I was afforded a glimpse into Markopoulos’ artistry in the form of Ming Green, an ephemeral evocation of the delicate light in a small apartment room, its remarkable simplicity only serving to augment its potency.  Having also had the recent opportunity to witness Robert Beaver’s own cycle Winged Distance/Sightless Mesure, which surely must be one of the great works of cinema in its own right, experiencing Markopoulos’ cycle has the added allure of offering further insight into Beaver’s work (Sitney claims that “a parallel hyperbole might usefully claim that he constricted the history of cinema to the films of Gregory Markopoulos”).  Like most of the work on this list, this one series stands as a literal opportunity to witness an entire life lived in conjunction with and expressed through the art form, an intriguing prospect for anyone dedicated to the medium.

Fuses (1965, Carolee Schneemann)

L'étoile de mer (1928, Man Ray)

In considering previous explanations of the union of “this complicity of desire with this sort of plasticity”, he believes that the majority of the so-called “modernist answers” have come to an incorrect and simplified conclusion that the relation shared by image and the surface events (re:effects) are negative, in that the images are rendered inscrutable and are subsequently less alluring.

Dog Star Man Pt. 3 (1964, Stan Brakhage)

He posits that the true answer is much more complex than that.  The effects imposed on the surface of the film seem to be essentially without form, thereby negating concept and resisting quantitative significance, or in other words they could be characterized as nothing, which itself is a negative notion.  Contrary to that is the fact that while it is true that the image can often be obscured by the events taking place on the surface, they can just as often amplify the significance or structure of the image, which would certainly be categorized as a positive relation.

Air Cries "Empty Water" Pt. 2: The Red Thread (1993, Carl E. Brown)

He goes on to further illuminate the complexity that underlies this relation, examining the positive, the resistance of the surface events, like flesh (quite literally the “skin of the film”), to be separated into individually significant parts, as well the libidinous nature of the reaction we can have to these events, and the negative, the inconsistency amongst the surface events can also be more than reality or pleasure can contain, and thus manifest themselves in the same way uncontainable desire does, with decay and eventually death.

Halcion (2007, Dietmar Brehm)

Furthermore he invokes Freud and illustrates conflicting themes such as Eros (the personification of lust/love) and Thanatos (the personification of Death), Symbolic and Imaginary, the unmoving image (stasis) and the fluctuating surface, and the potentially ecstatic tension created by their coexistence within these films.

Eros and Wonder (2003, R. Bruce Elder)

He closes with the following: “Like a moebius strip, then, the image turns into the surface event that turns back into image, as eros is transformed into thanatos and thanatos into eros.  These transformations cannot be conceptualized and stated discursively, for meaning depends upon signs and signs depend upon distinctions and separations and what we have here is fusion in form of coincidentia oppositorum (the coincidence or unity of opposites).”

Christmas On Earth (1963, Barbara Rubin)

Le Tombeau d'Aphrodite v.2 (2004, Olivier Fouchard)

 [1]This essay, which in its full form is much more eloquent and enlightening than my humble and extremely simplified summary can attest to, originally appeared in Northern Exposures: Recent Canadian Experimental Film. Buffalo: CEPA Gallery, 29 Jan.-30 Apr. 1994: 3-7.[touring program Albright-Knox Gallery and George Eastman House Museum].  R. Bruce Elder was awarded the Robert Motherwell Book Award this year for his book Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century, a much deserved honor.

Transferimento di Modulazione (1969, Piero Bargellini)

(The images I’ve included were not a part of the original essay)