Lamentations (A Monument to the Dead World)
The Innis Film Society showed this epic film in the sprig of 1986, as a two-parter where audiences saw Part 1 at Innis and Part 2 at the AGO (before I worked there but our first collaboration with them). I sort of view it as the first real screening of the version of the Film Society that would see us through to almost a decade of adventurous artists’ filmmaking: historical works, filmmakers in person with their works, critical evenings, inter-disciplinary programs, and the occasional Hollywood classic, Euro/Japanese art film, or documentary to keep things interesting.
Bruce Elder’s film really felt like “now, someone is finally doing something bold with cinema. actually responding to the possibilities of the medium and treating it like an art form on par with great poetry, painting and musical composition.”
It was truly a great evening for the film itself, but also because I really feel like the Film Society came was born that night (Kate MacKay was in first year, and attended; Paul Della Penna was there; Mike Zryd; Susan Oxtoby; Bart Testa; Jim Smith; Mike Cartmell; Tom Thibault; Ellen Ladwosky; and many others).
I wrote the following piece for TIFF’s Canada On Screen website and you can still read it in its original presentation there (http://www.tiffcanadaonscreen.com/experimental-film-and-video/lamentations-a-monument-to-the-dead-world).
Bruce Elder’s Lamentations (A Monument to the Dead World) belongs to a film cycle, The Book of All the Dead, which comprises the bulk of Elder’s filmmaking from 1975 to 1994. In ancient Egyptian culture, the Book of the Dead consisted of religious texts intended to help preserve the spirit of the departed in the afterlife — but in Elder’s reading, that comforting idea of continuity takes on a rather darker cast. Over the course of its 35 hours, the cycle suggests that the era where humans had an authentic bond with God has definitively passed; in modernity, we are each left to our own devices, deprived of divine guidance.
In a controversial manifesto, “The Cinema We Need,” that was written while making Lamentations, Elder elaborated this view to propose a new philosophy of film aesthetics, taking aim at narrative in general and the “new narrative” movement that some critics said was emerging at the time in particular. Drawing on the Canadian philosopher George Grant’s Lament for a Nation, and in turn the thought of Martin Heidegger, Elder characterizes narrative and realist representation as “rituals that have become meaningless and empty. And just as rituals must be changed when this happens, so must the form of cinema, if it is to help us rediscover our wonder at the gift of things.”
Following on from this proposition, Lamentations is comprised of a complex and disparate patchwork of audio and visual elements: a philosophical meditation superimposed as text throughout the film; a voiceover narration and more additional philosophical texts; and vignettes featuring a comical but disturbing Franz Liszt, an angry, deranged man in an alley, and an arrogant psychiatrist. While Elder does not exile narrative entirely, he continually counterpoints it with non-narrative elements — most significantly the many beautiful, kinetically shot and edited images of landscapes, bodies and technology — or undercuts it, as when an intellectual debate between Sir Isaac Newton (David King) and George Berkeley (Tony Wolfson) is accompanied by Bill Gilliam’s avant-garde electronic soundtrack and repeatedly interrupted by white frames. In the second part of the film, Elder turns his attention away from the narcissistic characters of Part One and sets out to find salvation in the forests of British Columbia, the American Southwest and Mexico’s Yucatan — but there is no escape from the decadence of modernity.
A major influence on many artists and writers both locally and internationally — including Richard Kerr, Bruce McDonald, Izabella Pruzka, Stephen Broomer and Erika Loic — Lamentations also earned Elder the praise of avant-garde legend Stan Brakhage, who said of his fellow artist: “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.”