R. Bruce Elder - The Book of All the Dead (Region Three)

“Gathering films made between 1975 and 1994, the forty-two–hour-long The Book of All the Dead may be the most ambitious work in the medium, an epic of Biblical proportions and structure, in the same league as the towering achievements on which is modelled—Dante’s Divine Comedy, Pound’s Cantos, and Wagner’s Ring. This poetic meditation on modern history from the perspective of its endpoint in technological rationalism aims to wean viewers away from the instrumental rationality enshrined in narrative forms, so as to rekindle more embodied—and therefore more spiritual—modes of awareness of ‘being-in-the-world.’ Elder’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 particulars are combined and recombined in shifting juxtapositions, meaning is generated, because such a form encourages people to discover likenesses among dissimilar and unexpected things. (RBE)’ –Christian Roy (for Cinematheque Ontario)

Region Three: Exultations (In Light of the Great Giving) (665 min., colour, 1988)

A series of films based on reading Dante’s Paradiso. The traveller and Beatrice instructor in the ways of love ascend into the Empyrean beyond the boundary of time and space. Beatrice explains more and more about the workings of God and the Universe, so everything that Dante in his journey at last is understood. After the horrors of Hell and the hardships of Purgatory, the traveller and the audience finally understand the secrets of God’s universe.

The Third Region of The Book of All the Dead, Exultations (In Light of the Great of Giving),” (1976-1994) comprises the following films: Flesh Angels, Barbara Is a Vision of Loveliness, Newton and Me, Azure Serene, Look! We Have Come Through!, Exultations: In Light of the Great Giving, Sweet Love Remembered, Burying the Dead (Into the Light), Trace, Et Resurrectus Est.