The Book of All the Dead1975

“Gathering films made between 1975 and 1994, the forty-two–hour-long The Book of All the Dead may be the most ambitious work in the medium, an epic of Biblical proportions and structure, in the same league as the towering achievements on which is modelled—Dante’s Divine Comedy, Pound’s Cantos, and Wagner’s Ring. This poetic meditation on modern history from the perspective of its endpoint in technological rationalism aims to wean viewers away from the instrumental rationality enshrined in narrative forms, so as to rekindle more embodied—and therefore more spiritual—modes of awareness of ‘being-in-the-world.’ Elder’s films are therefore designed to frustrate the conceptual mind’s habitual reliance on univocal frameworks, wearing it down to induce instead a willing surrender befor a barrage of elements that ‘operate[s] on various scales—from the personal, to the historical, to the philosophical, to the anagogic . . . When such particulars are combined and recombined in shifting juxtapositions, meaning is generated, because such a form encourages people to discover likenesses among dissimilar and unexpected things. (RBE)’ –Christian Roy (for Cinematheque Ontario)

The Book of All the Dead are divided in three “regions,” which mirror the three cantiche of Dante Alighieri’s Commedia.

REGION ONE: The System Of Dante's Hell

A group of films based on reading Dante’s Inferno. A traveller finds himself lost in the middle of life’s journey, uncertain that he can find a way through. The films are an implicit glorification of the ways of God and a protest of the way in humans (ancient and modern) have thwarted the divine plan. It expresses anguish at the injustice and corruption of the times.

1. Breath/Light/Birth 
2. The Art of Worldly Wisdom 
3. 1857 (Fool's Gold) 
4. Illuminated Texts 
5. Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World, Part 1: The Dream of the Last Historian 
6. Sweet Love Remembered 
7. Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World, Part 2: The Sublime Calculation 
8. Permutations and Combinations 

REGION TWO: Consolations: Love is an Art of Time.

Three films based on reading Dante’s Purgatorio. The traveller emerges from Hell and arrive at a mountain “where the human spirit purges itself to become worthy of Heaven.”  The films express the view that that greater love for others is an antidote to the world’s barbarities, that evil may be understood as a sin against love. The landscapes the films depict are forbidding, but the tone of the voice-over and supertitles is one of waiting and hope. (RBE)

1. Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time) Part 1: The Fugitive Gods 
2. Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time) Part 2: The Lighted Clearing 
3. Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time) Part 3: The Body and the World 

REGION THREE: Exultations (In Light of the Great Giving)

A series of films based on reading Dante’s Paradiso. The traveller and Beatrice instructor in the ways of love ascend into the Empyrean beyond the boundary of time and space. Beatrice explains more and more about the workings of God and the Universe, so everything that Dante in his journey at last is understood. After the horrors of Hell and the hardships of Purgatory, the traveller and the audience finally understand the secrets of God’s universe.

1. Flesh Angels 
2. Look! We Have Come Through! 
3. Newton and Me 
4. Barbara Is a Vision of Loveliness 
5. Azure Serene 
6. She Is Away 
7. Exultations: In Light of the Great Giving 
8. Burying the Dead: Into the Light 
9. Trace 
10. Et Resurrectus Est