A Body of Vision: Representations of the Body in Recent Film and Poetry

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

The scope of this volume is truly astonishing. While its primary focus
is the human body or parts thereof, as seen in selected poems and
representative avant-garde films, it is encyclopedic in its approach and
contents. There are references to artists, poets, thinkers, and
filmmakers from Aristophanes to Louis Zukofsky and discussions of art,
aesthetics, cinema, religion, philosophy, and Gnosticism. The author
posits Gnosticism as the dominant theme of his own films and also the
films of the artists under review in this book. Although A Body of
Vision will probably attract a limited audience of scholars,
researchers, and theoreticians, it will undoubtedly stir them to lively
debate over Elder’s views of Gnosticism and over his skirmishes with
established schools of criticism, poetic theory, and religious thought.
The book is well researched and includes more than 30 pages of
footnotes.

Elder examines the films of Bruce Conner, Willard Maas, Walter Gutman,
James Broughton, Ed Emshwiller, Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann, James
Herbert, Amy Greenfield, and Andrew Norton. In one chapter, he expertly
dissects Leonard Cohen’s poetry and Gnosticism. In another, he traces
the tangled threads of Gnosticism through the writings and comments of
Antonin Artaud. Although his language is sometimes convoluted and
abstract, his explanations of experimental filmmaking techniques and
processes are crystal clear, for example when he describes Herbert’s
use of the optical printer, Conner’s creation of film collages from
“found footage,” Brakhage’s manipulation of a hand-held camera,
Greenfield’s focus on “film-dance,” and Noren’s fascination with
variations of light.

At one point, Elder expresses the hope that “some good may come of a
filmmaker’s attempt to put down on paper how he thinks about issues
that are central to his own artistic work”; indeed, it has.