Companion to the author's Harmony and dissent, demonstrates that for the early-twentieth-century avant-garde movements cinema was the pre-eminent form that served as a model for recasting the other arts, proclaiming it the most important art as it exemplified the vibrancy of contemporary life.
Argues that the authors of many of the manifestos that announced in such lively ways the appearance of yet another artistic movement shared a common aspiration: they proposed to reformulate the visual, literary, and performing arts so that they might take on attributes of the cinema.
Elder's study is filled with vividly detailed readings of films that map the confused and exhilarating intersections of the body and the symbolic processes that surround and issue from it. His focus is tight, his resistance to the limits of realist representation both powerful and convincing.
Filmmaker, author and critic, R. Bruce Elder inspires and enjoys debate. His films have been exhibited internationally and his polemical piece, The Cinema We Need, remains one of the most discussed pieces of writing on Canadian film. Elder has also produced a forty-two-hour film cycle entitled The Book of All the Dead. In 2007 R. Bruce Elder received the Governor Generals Award in Visual and Media Arts.