Still from film "The Young Prince" by Bruce Elder
Here is an email interaction I had with a Reclaiming Beauty reader who was getting spam email after commenting on my site. He also informed me that he was a student of Bruce Elder.
I am posting the interaction since it is really a continuation of my posts which I titled Art Thieves.
Dear _____,Here is the response from my correspondent:
Sorry to get back to you late. I cannot "unsubscribe" you at the moment, but I'm looking up how to and hope to do so soon.
[...]
Yes, I had Bruce Elder. He was an odd fellow, and to be honest, not very artistic. I think that was partly his forceful presence in "experimental" film. He started out as a poet, but failed at that, then turned to film.
I was one of his protege's, but I left the group. I criticized him on several occasions, twice during speeches he was making at public lectures. He could never answer my basic question of "why was he trying to destroy the image." He would thoroughly disapprove of my "realist" approach to photography.
I also similarly criticized the big and formidable Stan [Brakhage] during one of his visits to Toronto, in Bruce's home, where I was a member of his "round table" group of students, faculty and artists (we met about once a week for drinks and discussions). My question to Stan [Brakhage] was similar in stance to the one I asked Bruce [Elder], of why he was destroying the image. Stan [Brakhage], for a few brief moments, didn't know what to say. I think he deflected the question and talked about something else.
Your photographs are wonderful. You have a beautiful family.
All the best,
Kidist
No rush. Thanks.I reply:
p.s. I must contact a friend who now lives in Montreal and tell him your thoughts on Bruce Elder. He'll smile. I had Bruce speak at an NPPA seminar once. I gave him a simple task, to talk about two television news reports, one American and one Canadian and both reporting on the same story. The news stories took two different views. The news was clearly biased in one or both countries. Bruce veered off into a very weird talk that literally emptied the auditorium. Hundreds fled his talk. I laugh now but I was the seminar chair and it was an awful moment.
Cheers!
Dear ____,-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have removed commenting functions from Reclaiming Beauty. It looks like people send spam email to those who comment, as one reader informed me.
Thanks for your patience.
Here is one really interesting piece of information proclaimed by The Great Bruce himself:"Years ago, I used to tell people, only half facetiously, that I was a film maker because I wasn't a creative artist."More at In Conversation with R. Bruce Elder on the "techniques" he developed to make his films (one of which, I should add, which he hasn't, is to stand clothless infront of the camera being "creative" with himself).
He got one other film student, a woman called Izabella Pruska, to take off her clothes and make her "films." Here she in all her non-glory posing for the Toronto Star.
Here is her [film] Garden of Earthly Delights, which is a clever erotica, a la Elder, where we see flashes of her "delights."
They have made porn, basically. The greatest of nudes in classical painting were never so explicit (or subversively explicit).
And here is Pruska's latest: This Town of Toronto, with the Elder imprint of layered images that are difficult to decipher, repetitive, and which I call "destruction of the image." And Brakhage's imprint of flowers as erotica. Also, using old (or found) footage is another lazy way out of making films and photographs, as I write here in my recent post Art Thieves.
The film was shown at a Ryerson University Symposium in 2013: Electric Visions: How DADA and Surrealism Anticipated the Later Avant-Garde.
Pruska also had funding from Canada Council to make this 3-minute piece. They never think to fund their own films. Pruska is married to a well-positioned pharmaceutical researcher, at INC Research, who I have no doubt has enough money to pay for his wife's "experiments" - (the Elder crowd calls itself "experimental film makers").
Pruska, and MacDonell (subject of Art Thieves) both teach at Ryerson now. The "legacy" lives on.
Macdonell never took off her clothes, but her Masters thesis, which went into the "festival" circuit, was based on the "found" images of a "burlesque dancer" as she calls it, which is another way of saying "a stripper."
Better label for these film makers might be "Subversive porn film makers."
Those that Elder couldn't get to declothe, he got them to shoot him in his exposed glory. One woman who filmed him in his many naked works, never worked in film after that. She is now a manager (or producer, or a freelancer) at some video production company.
Elder tried to get me to film him as well, but that was one of the last straws which convinced me to quit his program. I left without finishing my degree at Ryerson (with only one more year to go!).
But, I got my films exhibited around Toronto [and in Europe], as well as my photographs.
I do not miss those days. As Elder said, there was nothing creative about it. I actually call it 'evil." His aim is to get at your "subconscious," and more precisely, your sexual/Freudian subconscious.
[Stan] Brakhage [an American filmmaker] also worked at this "subliminal" level, and essentially destroyed or distorted the image to make his films. But he was [more] clever than Elder. He made "imageless" films by coloring on the film itself. He is really akin to the abstract expressionists, who "splashed" paint all over the canvass, a la Jackson Pollock.
Here is a link to his "method" and aim.
Elder has a new book out (he is a prolific writer, or re-writer I should say), on Dada and surrealism. Both these movements are dead and gone (probably how their founders would have wanted it), but Elder keeps on churning out the Dada and the Surreal.
Here is the link to Dada, Surrealism and the Cinematic Effect, which came out in 2013. Same old, same old. Elder gets grants from the Canada Council and other government agencies to make his films and write his books. He has convinced them such that he can do whatever he feels like, and they give him the money for it.
Here is a google books link if you want to read large excerpts from the book.
This Dada book was funded by:
- The Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences
- Canada Council for the Arts
- Ontario Arts Council
etc.
The links below are from my old website, Camera Lucida, so images are missing, but here are a couple of posts I did on Elder when his film The Young Prince came out.
New Books on Art: Beauty, Dissent and Wreckage (April 14, 2009)
The Destruction of Art by Artists: Comments on Bruce Elder's Film "The Young Prince" (April 25, 2009)
I hope I haven't bored you!
Best,
Kidist
Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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