Illuminated Texts1982

“Breathtaking in its techniques, rhapsodic in its passion, and encyclopedia in its scope, the film traces the long fall from paradise into modern barbarism.” –Art Gallery of Ontario

“A very demanding work of great complexity and rigour, Illuminated Texts presents itself as a great debate between nature and technology, unity and dissolution, the divine and demonic, an irrecoverable past and the terrible velocity of time. Following on Elder’s previous films, the autobiographical The Art Of Worldly Wisdom and the structural essay in history 1857 (Fool’s Gold), Illuminated Texts reenacts, this time on a single site, both the task of constructing a self and the progression of historical agony. Although prolix in his use of texts— acted out, superimposed on the image, spoken in voice-over—and proliferate in the range of his imagery, Elder has constructed Illuminated Texts classically as an inexorable movement from paradise to apocalypse, or in the formal terms the film uses, from plenitude to fragmentation. It is a sign of Elder’s continuing commitment to a romantic sensibility marking all his movies that the most horrific section of Illuminated Texts, its apocalyptic conclusion, is also the most stunning 45 minutes Elder has so far committed to film.” –Bart Testa, Canadian Images

“…an intensely emotional as well as demanding cerebral apocalyptic world view. It contains an encyclopedic barrage of spoken and written texts amid a continually changing pattern of electric and photographic images.”–Linda Gross, Los Angeles Times