Book of All the Dead, The

“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.” Stan Brakhage THE BOOK OF ALL THE DEAD (1975-1994) The Book of All the Dead is comprised of three sections: The System of Dante’s Hell, Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time) and Exultations (In Light of the Great Giving). The cycle is made up of all the films listed here and some others (both completed and uncompleted). I have no better explanation for the choice of the term ‘book’ that Duncan’s comment: “Oh lasting Sentence/Sentence after sentence I make in your image. In the feet that measure the dance of my pages I hear cosmic intoxications of the man I will be.” (From The Structure of Rime I) The Book of All the Dead concerns recovering what has been lost in the modern era, a sense of subjectivity and personal as well as cultural values, an awe before God and Nature. As Elder has stated, “The cycle begins with the emergence of Nature out of nothing and ends with the New Beginning. Moreover, the interweaving of themes in The Book of All the Dead constitutes a gigantic metaphor for the development and conflicts within an individual whose development in turn stands for the historical process itself. On the more psychological level, its main them is love and the irreconcilability of love with domination. Along with this there is a social or political level of import which deals with the attempt to rescue a corrupt world presided over by degenerate idols….The protagonist of the cycle is Time.” PART ONE: THE SYSTEM OF DANTE’S HELL Breath/Light/Birth b&w. 6 min. (1975) Video transformation of documentary footage of a woman giving birth, assisted by members of a religious commune. Isolation confronts the communal, the gruesome confronts the holy in this most mysterious of events. RBE Sweet Love Remembered 14 min. (1980) 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.” RBE The Art of Worldly Wisdom 55 min. (1979) “The dark wood encountered in the middle of life’s journey.” (Dante) Los Angeles Critics Award, Best Experimental Film “A compelling and revealing exploration of one person’s psyche in crisis” Linda Gross / “Combines elaborate split-screen and multi-voice soundtrack to produce a self-portrait at once satiric and poignant.” AGO Trace 1 min. (1980) The memory of a nearly perfect evening. RBE Permutations and Combinations 8 min. (1976) A close container for chance elements. Together with She Is Away, makes apparent some features of the material form of which the entire cycle would be composed. RBE 1857 (Fool’s Gold) 25 min. (1981) Audience Award, Montreal Poetry Film Festival Honorable Mention, San Francisco Poetry Film Festival “an act of celebration….He reproduces – with light and colour, sound , stillness and movement – the ineluctable rhythm and energy of the natural world.” Carol Zucker Look! We Have Come Through! b&w. 12 min. (1978) “a revelation of the editing process…done with remarkable care and precision….The interrelationship between moving body and moving camera is heightened to the intensity of a struggle.” Joyce Nelson Illuminated Texts 180 min. (1982) “Breathtaking in its techniques, rhapsodic in its passion, and encyclopedic in its scope, the film traces the long fall from paradise into modern barbarism.” AGO Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World (1985) Part 1: The Dream of the Last Historian 195 min. A “meditation that deals with the state of human consciousness in the postmodern world….a truly monumental film.” Katie Russell / “transcends conventional form in an accessible, exciting shape that is likely to change the way all of us see movies.” Robert Haller She Is Away 13 min. (1976) “evokes absence through elliptical continuity and loneliness through the repetition of…archetypal images.” Ian Birnie Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World (1985) Part 2: The Sublime Calculation 240 min. Barbara Is a Vision of Loveliness b&w. 8 min. (1976) Canadian Film Award, Best Experimental Film The optical manipulation of tone, shape, line and movement creates a purely cinematic choreography. RBE PART TWO: CONSOLATIONS (LOVE IS AN ART OF TIME) Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time) (1988) Part 1: The Fugitive Gods 220 min.; Part 2: The Lighted Clearing 220 min.; Part 3: The Body and the World 240 min. “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 / “Elder is on the right track, the only track, and his film, despite the overbearing length, is harmonious, lucid and emotional.” Helen Knode PART THREE: EXULTATIONS (IN LIGHT OF THE GREAT GIVING) Flesh Angels 110 min. (1990) “A beatific vision of the imaginary landscape of paradise, inspired by the poetry of…Blake.” Pacific Cinematheque / “the latest image technology and exotic new computer mathematics like fractals and cellular automata rhym[ed]…with Dante’s medieval cosmology….a heady blend of the high-tech and the antique…that dazzles the eye.” Bart Testa Newton and Me 110 min. (1990) Newton was the greatest of all the natural magicians, learned in matters musical, theological and in Apocalyptic literature. He believed bodies were composed of “certain aetheral spirits, or vapours”; one…is the ether, “the succus nutritius of the earth, or primary substance”; the second substance disseminated through the first, is light. RBE Azure Serene 95 min. (1992) “Inspired by the poets of Rainer Maria Rilke, Louis Zukofsky and Ezra Pound…Elder’s latest film…is a visually lush collage,” and “ironic attempt to construct a Divine Comedy for modern times.” Jim Shedden Exultations: In Light of the Great Giving 90 min. (1993) Moves toward the vision of time when Heaven descends to earth and makes all earth one with Heaven…when the outside becomes as the inside, and the inside as the outside; when the male and the female become one and the same…when the end returns to the beginning and the beginning finds completion in the end. RBE Burying the Dead: Into the Light 90 min. (1993) 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 Et Resurrectus Est 135 min. (1994) “Behold, I show you a mystery. Not everyone shall sleep, but everyone shall be changed.” “The Book of All the Dead” contains three regions: The System of Dante’s Hell, Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time) and Exultations (In Light of the Great Giving). For further information on “The Book of All the Dead,” please see listings for the individual films.