Praised by Jonas Mekas as the "the most important North American avant-garde filmmaker to emerge during the 1980s," Canadian filmmaker and critic R. Bruce Elder's work places images of nature and the body within rigorous theories on art, spirituality, and philosophy. Now playing for free on Nomadica (hosted by the LABA Libera Academy of Fine Arts) until May 30, his 1982 film Illuminated Texts is one chapter of his magnum opus, the film cycle The Book of All The Dead. In fact, Illuminated Texts only makes up three hours of the cycle's 46 hours, which consists of 20 films made between 1975 and 1994. But the questions that the encyclopedic film raises about image-making technology, forms of knowledge, and the discord of human history, are wholly realized.
Illuminated Texts begins with a satirical opening involving a pushy professor who imposes false mathematical teachings onto his all-too-willing and dim-witted pupil. This forceful institutional pedagogy is challenged by the film's subsequent chapters, in which Elder superimposes texts by John Milton, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Jacques Lacan, and others, over repeated footage of cities, deserts, and seas, as well as stills from Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies. These sequences invoke the process by which external stimuli becomes filtered through perception, then language, and finally internalized as knowledge.
How the filmed image informs this procedure is of utmost concern to Elder, who cross-cuts between Muybridge's studies of animals and bodies and Elder's own footage of everyday life. The latter portion of Illuminated Texts adopts a more dreadful tone, drawing a line from these motion studies to the filmed atrocities committed during the Holocaust, accompanied by transitions done with an optical printer that visually divide and disassemble the frame. From Toronto to Berlin, Elder's globe-trotting is punctured by history's ghosts, who overwhelm the film as a choir of wailing voices and excerpts of survivor testimonies that appear in its apocalyptic conclusion. In 1985, Elder published the controversial manifesto "The Cinema We Need" (its title is also referenced by Nomadica's screening site). The essay argues for a "separate aesthetic of Canadian avant-garde filmmaking." Elder writes:
Representations can only deal with the past. We need a cinema that can deal with the here and now. Any cinema that wishes to deal with the experience of the moment must not offer description; rather, it must reveal how events come to be in experience, that is, the dynamic by which events are brought into presence in experience.
In the fullness of its scale, Illuminated Texts reflects the filmmaker's own journey to produce a necessary work that stands in resistance to the limitations of the representational image.