The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1979)

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Director:

R. Bruce Elder

Plot Keywords:

Independent Film

Awards:

1 win

Runtime:

55 min

Country:

Canada

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Navel-gazing at the very highest level

This film is clearly the work of a fanatical Stan Brakhage lover -- to the point of ripping off Brakhage's trademark flicker-titles -- but one who seems to have drawn all the wrong lessons from his idol.

The entire running time is a sustained aural and visual farrago of super-impositions, contrasts, dissonances and overlaps. Multiple images jostle for space on the screen and different soundtracks periodically drown each other out. Elder is evidently hoping to attain the same radical associative effect that Brakhage achieved with Dog Star Man, but without the tenuous tie to reality provided by the man climbing the mountain, the effect is just one of pure, meaningless chaos.

The effect is not improved by the fact that, unlike Brakhage's stark silence, Elder has elected to sledge-hammer home his meaning by inserting a voice-over narration in among the many soundtracks, which intermittently provides us with autobiographical musings and personal insights, all of which tend toward the suffocatingly pretentious.

There is, ultimately, a certain inspiration to be had from the film, in that it reminds you of just how protean the medium of cinema really is, and that the making of totally unique and personal works within it is simply a matter of will. There are shots and subjects in this film that you will assuredly never see in any mainstream commercial film (the phrase "cinematic masturbation" comes to mind for more than the usual one reason), but the ultimate effect is still one of exasperation -- of a man determined to imitate the work of an artist far beyond him, and ending up producing only a vague shambles. Elder might have been better advised to imitate the far starker, bloodier, more unified and earth-bound Brakhage of Window Water Baby Moving and The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes, than trying to imitate the extreme flights of associative fantasy of Dog Star Man. The cost of failure would have been lower.