Ad Hoc #75: Alone (All Flesh Shall See It Together)

AD HOC present R. Bruce Elder, in person, with his and Ajla Odobašić’s new film, Alone (All Flesh Shall See It Together). Elder writes:

“We all know that electric media have produced numerous degrading, all-pervasive forms of surveillance that have virtually eliminated that privacy which heretofore was a bastion of human dignity. But is it possible that electric media and their capacities for openness and revelation might result in a new form of transcendence? 

“This question constitutes the problematic of ALONE (ALL FLESH SHALL SEE IT TOGETHER) and the poem at the core of the work. The project embodies our (R. Bruce Elder and Ajla Odobašić’s) imaginings of what the electric poetry of the future might be: a multi-focal, multi-medial form whose nature reflects the interpenetration of all energies everywhere and throughout time–an ethereal togetherness.”

Since 1975, R. Bruce Elder has been building two formidable bodies of work, as an artist working in the experimental tradition, and as an author of critical texts on art and cinema. His role as an author has in recent years assumed the task of charting the relationship between cinema and art movements through the twentieth century, as we see in his recent book, DADA, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect, his previous, Harmony & Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century, and the forthcoming Cubism and Futurism: Spiritual Machines and the Cinematic Effect

A prolific filmmaker, he has made over sixty hours of films, which have been screened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Millennium Film Workshop, Berlin’s Kino Arsenal, Paris’s Centre Pompidou, the San Francisco Cinematheque, Atlanta’s High Museum, Los Angeles Film Forum, Stadtfilmmuseum München, Hamburg’s Kino Metropolis and Barcelona’s Centre de Cultura Contemporània. Retrospectives of his work have been presented by Anthology Film Archives (NY), the Art Gallery of Ontario, Cinématheque Québecoise, Il Festival Senzatitolo (Trento), Paris’s Festival des cinémas différents, and EXiS (Seoul). Jonas Mekas, founder of the New York Filmmakers Co-op and principle visionary of the American avant-garde cinema, has dubbed him “the most important North American avant-garde filmmaker to emerge during the 1980s.” 

TRT: 1 hour 45 minutes

AD HOC aims to rethink what an experience of cinema can be. We seek to reposition historical landmarks and buried treasures within the on-going tradition of experimental and other non- commercial modes of filmmaking, drawing on work from Toronto, throughout Canada, and internationally. Within these parameters, we aspire to diversity in programming, as well as to multimedia and interdisciplinary screening events that bring together varied communities.

AD HOC = Stephen Broomer, Madi Piller, Jim Shedden, Bart Testa.

AD HOC would like to thank Alberto Zambenedetti, Denise Ing, Charlie Keil, and the staff of Innis College and the Cinema Studies Institute.