The Book of All the Dead

Part 5 · Jan 30, 1978

Look! We Have Come Through!

"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

Part 6 · Jun 7, 1979

The Art of Worldly Wisdom

A compelling and revealing exploration of one person's psyche in crisis.... The film is a screen diary of a man in his early 30s afflicted with a life-threatening disease, a man confronting his own mortality.

Part 7 · Jan 27, 1980

Sweet Love Remembered

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."

Part 8 · May 30, 1980

Trace

The memory of a nearly perfect evening.

Part 9 · Jan 26, 1981

1857 (Fool's Gold)

This film is an act of celebration ... He produces -- with light and colour, sound, stillness and movement -- the ineluctable rhythm and energy of the natural world.

Part 10 · Jan 27, 1982

Illuminated Texts

"Breathtaking in its techniques, rhapsodic in its passion, and encyclopedic in its scope, the film traces the long fall from paradise into modern barbarism." - Art Gallery of Ontario

Part 11 · Oct 10, 1985

Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World, Part 1: The Dream of the Last Historian

Like Ezekiel's vision in the valley of the dry bones, a typos of a new beginning. In among all the feelings of loss and deprivation there occur intimations of final culbute général, of the dissolution of time, of a now that vanishes between the no long and the not yet.

Part 12 · Oct 11, 1985

Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World, Part 2: The Sublime Calculation

Part 13 · Jan 27, 1988

Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time) Part 1: The Fugitive Gods

"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

Part 14 · Jan 27, 1988

Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time) Part 2: The Lighted Clearing

"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

Part 15 · Jan 27, 1988

Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time) Part 3: The Body and the World

"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

Part 16 · Jan 27, 1990

Flesh Angels

"A beatific vision of the imaginary landscape of paradise, inspired by the poetry of ... Blake." Pacific Cinematheque

Part 17 · Mar 2, 1991

Newton and Me

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.

Part 18 · Feb 20, 1992

Azure Serene

"Inspired by the poems 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

Part 19 · Oct 24, 1993

Exultations: In Light of the Great Giving

The titular film of region three of Elder's Book of All the Dead

Part 20 · Nov 21, 1993

Burying the Dead (Into the Light)

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)

Part 21 · Jan 30, 1994

Et Resurrectus Est

"Behold, I show you a mystery. Not everyone shall sleep, but everyone shall be changed."