What do images of the body, which recent poets and filmmakers have given us, tell us about ourselves, about the way we think and about the culture in which we live?
In his new book A Body of Vision, R. Bruce Elder situates contemporary poetic and cinematic body images in their cultural context.
Elder examines how recent artists have tried to recognize and to convey primordial forms of experiences. He proposes the daring thesis that in their efforts to do so, artists have resorted to gnostic models of consciousness. He argues that the attempt to convey these primordial modes of awareness demands a different conception of artistic meaning from any of those that currently dominate contemporary critical discussion. By reworking theories and speech in highly original ways, Elder formulates this new conception.
The works of Brakhage, Artaud, Schneeman, Cohen and others lie naked under Elder’s razor-sharp dissecting knife and he exposes the essence of their work, cutting deeply into the themes and theses from which the works are derived. His remarks on the gaps in contemporary critical practices will likely become the focus of much debate.

R. Bruce Elder is a filmmaker, critic, and teacher (and former Program Director) in the Graduate Program in Communication and Culture at Ryerson University. His film work has been screened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Millennium Film Workshop, Berlin’s Kino Arsenal, Paris’ Centre Pompidou, the San Francisco Cinematheque, Atlanta’s High Museum, Los Angeles’ Film Forum, Stadtfilmmuseum München, and Hamburg’s Kino Metropolis. Retrospectives of his work have been presented by Anthology Film Archives (NY), the Art Gallery of Ontario, Cinématheque Québecoise, Il Festival Senzatitolo (Trento), Images Film and Video Festival (Toronto). Cinematheque Ontario has said this about him: “R. Bruce Elder is not only one of Canada’s foremost experimental filmmakers, he’s one of our greatest artists, thinkers, critics, and filmmakers, period.” Harmony & Dissent, his previous book on film and avant-garde art movements, was awarded the Robert Motherwell Book Prize, shortlisted for the Raymond Kilbansky Prize, and named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book for 2010. His next book entitled DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect is forthcoming from WLU Press.

R. Bruce Elder's profile page

Image and Identity at its best is intoxicated with its subject and can take a reader straight into it. For those who share the same serious fascination with Canadian culture that Armour, Trott, and Kroker address in their books, Image and Identity will come as something of a revelation: that some Canadian films at least are not homeless orphans of a national cinema that keeps stumbling, but works very much at home in the landscape of Canadian art and thought.

Bart Testa, Globe and Mail, November 18, 1989

Daunting, dense, encyclopedic, exhaustive, exhausting, and often brilliant.

M. Yacowar, Emily Carr College of Art and Design, Choice, January 1990

Within its compass, that of Canadian intellectual history, Image and Identity is a methodological correction to the state of Canadian film studies. Elder's study seeks to perform a contextual redress for Canadian film, negatively in the case of documentary cinema and realist fiction film, positively in the case of the avant-garde. He manages this task admirably, arguing clearly and in depth as a scholar fully conversant with the exemplary recent work in Canadian studies by Armour and Trott and by Wilden, Reid, and Kroker, and with the original sources their writing explores.

Bart Testa, University of Toronto Quarterly, Fall 1990

One of the better-kept secrets about Elder's past is his formal graduate study in philosophy. This training can no longer remain a secret to readers of this book. But, in addition, Elder reveals a firm grasp of Canadian history, against which he explains the country's philosophical and aesthetic evolution. His documentation ... is impressively scholarly.

Cam Tolton, Canadian Book Review Annual, Number 135, 1989, 1991 February

Bruce Elder has written a work as ambitious, expansive and impressive as many of his own film projects.

Cantrills Filmnotes, Number 59/60, September 1989