A screening of Fernand Léger’s influential Ballet Méchanique and Introduction by filmmaker and critic R. Bruce Elder: “Léger, Machine Art, and Ballet Méchanique”
An evening with celebrated filmaker and critic R. Bruce Elder
The Factory Media Centre is proud to host the official Hamilton book launch of celebrated filmmaker and theorist R. Bruce Elder’s latest epic study of the cinema and its effect on art movements of the 20th century.
Join us on Friday, April 26, 2019 at 7:30pm for a screening of the iconic Fernand Léger short film Ballet Mécanique, followed by an analysis of the film by R. Bruce Elder. Copies of the book will be available for purchase and R. Bruce Elder will be present to sign copies of the book following the event.
R. Bruce Elder’s monumental new book, Cubism and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect (which follows on his previous books, including Dada, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect from 2013) is a densely packed and vibrational collection of insights into the “art of energy, light, and movement” of two central artistic movements of the early twentieth century.
– Peter O’Brien, Fortnightly Review
About the Book:
Cubism and Futurism were closely related movements that vied with each other in the economy of renown. Perception, dynamism, and the dynamism of perception—these were the issues that passed back and forth between the two. Cubism and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect shows how movement became, in the traditional visual arts. Further, it explores the role of the cinema in amplifying this interest, by demonstrating that with the advent of the cinema the time was over when an artwork strived to lift experience out the realm of flux and into the realm of the changeless eternal.
The cinema at this time was understood as an electric art, akin to X-rays, Lumia, and sonic energy. In this book, celebrated filmmaker and author R. Bruce Elder connects the dynamism that the cinema made an essential feature of the new artwork to the new science of electromagnetism.
Cubism he portrays as a movement on the cusp of the transition from the Cartesian world of standardized Cartesian coordinates and interchangeable machine parts to a Galvanic world of continuities and flows. Drawing on the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, Elder shows that Futurism, by way of contrast, embraced completely the emerging electromagnetic view of reality.
Cubism, and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect examines the similarities and differences between the two movements’ engagement with the new science of energy and shows that the notion of energy made central to the new artwork by the cinema assumed a spiritual dimension, as the cinema itself came to be seen as a pneumatic machine.
R. Bruce Elder is a filmmaker, critic and professor of cultural studies / media studies. Stan Brakhage, the colossus of the avant-garde film, wrote of him,
‘I feel closer to this epic-maker Elder than to any other living filmmaker: and yet I feel an aesthetic opposition of such intensity that I’m certain I will be working the rest of life Uphill to offset this grand haunt with every visual means at my disposal. I embrace his making with all my heart (knowing full well the desperate honest integrity of the man, the sweet graciousness of him, the largesse of the gift he has given).’
Stan Brakhage, Telling Time, 124–125.
Elder’s works combines images, music and text to create works that reflect his interest in philosophy, technology, science, spirituality and the human body. His first major film cycle (20 films), The Book of All the Dead, which draws on his long study of Dante Alighieri’s Commedia and Ezra Pound’s Cantos, conveys his preoccupation with the horrors of modernity, its faith in progress and the loss of a sense of what is good and evil. His current film cycle, The Book of Praise, makes extensive use of computer-image generation, highlighting his fascination with mathematics and digital technology. Elder has been a guest lecturer at institutions across North America and around the world and has written books and articles on film, music, poetry and the visual arts. In 2007, he received Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. The jury described him as “highly innovative,” “influential” and “acutely intelligent,” noting the enormous span of his practice and the demanding nature of his films.
He is a media artist, a cultural theorist and a software developer. His media 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, and Los Angeles’ Film Forum. 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) and Paris’ Festival des cinémas différents. A central theme of his thinking concerns the influence of developments in science and technology on vanguard art and the role technological media have played in transforming art-making and aesthetics.