Crack, Brutal Grief

“Powerful and raw, CRACK, BRUTAL GRIEF is an impressive extension of R. Bruce Elder’s obsessions with history, media culture, psychology, technology, and the cruelty found in nature. The film acts as a primal scream, literally and metaphorically. The point of departure for the film came shortly after the gruesome suicide of Elder’s close friend. Elder began an investigative examination of graphic images of suicides, scenes of horror, and hard-core pornography found on the internet, which ultimately form the thesis of this cathartic expression of grief. ‘Increasingly angered by the Web’s banalization of suffering, I decided to fashion a compilation film, using only material from the Web that would return to the degraded images I found there the full dignity of their horror’ (Elder). “Assisted by a talented team of young Toronto filmmakers – Ilana Gutman, Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, Maria Raponi, Jeremy Elder-Jubelin, and Greg Boa – Elder constructs a sophisticated montage of highly-processed imagery which transforms these images of horror into a weave of abstraction. The film’s inspired sound collage draws upon an expansive range of pop culture and avant-garde sources. Like Elder’s ‘The Book of All The Dead,’ ‘Crack, Brutal, Grief’ uses a series of dialectical concepts in opposition to probe a range of philosophical concerns related to the history of consciousness in the twentieth century.” – Cinematheque Ontario “Canadian filmmaker R. Bruce Elder has dazzled audiences for almost 30 years with his experimental films, and his latest project, ‘Crack, Brutal Grief,’ continues his reputation for getting to the core of who we are as a culture. The 130-minute film is composed entirely of images pulled off the Internet, and the surfeit of footage mixing porn and brutality is nothing short of shocking. Elder treats the images, though, augmenting their textures and swirling their colors, often making them into abstract, stylized imagescapes that are quite beautiful. ‘I was thinking about the plasticity of the image and how it was malleable,’ says Elder. He also asserts that he’s interested in ‘a cinema of the tactile rather than a cinema of the visual,’ a claim that holds up, thanks to the film’s thickly textured images. “‘Crack, Brutal Grief’ began when a friend killed himself with a chainsaw and Elder wanted a way to deal with his grief and horror. He immersed himself in the Web-based images, worked with them for hours at a time, studiously manipulating single frames in a process of grappling with the violence done to the human body. ‘Crack, Brutal Grief’ is not a gentle, pleasant digital film; instead it’s an assault that somehow manages to give meaning back to images that have been emptied out. “ – Holly Willis, Resalert