A Man Whose Life Was Full of Woe Has Been Surprised by Joy. 1998. R. Bruce Elder.

(4/26/00)

Elder's film bombards the viewer with sight and sound. There is a lot in it and it basically numbed me. I was unable to put much of it together in my head. It just flowed past me.

The film progresses from anger to acceptance. That is something that he told us, but I could see that he was doing a lot of griping in the first part of the film and towards the end there is a lot of "spiritual talk" about limitlessness, about God. There is a lot of praising towards the end and the film seems to end on a chord.

We come out of what I would call "floating imagery" periodically to see snatches of what looks like an old-fashioned silent-movie comedy about a cop and a giant animal which is really a person wearing a costume.

There are lots of shots of a penis, in some of which it was ejaculating. I found this tiresome after a while. Often on the soundtrack we hear a quote from a popular song: "Waah! I feel good!," always (or almost always) played when we are looking at a shot of a penis. I got tired of that, too, after a while.

In addition to hearing spoken words we see words printed on the film like subtitles. They are in black and often appear over dark areas of the screen so that you can't read them. I am sure that this was deliberate. Moreover, some of the text is printed in reverse, like mirror writing, making it even harder to read. This reverse writing usually appears on screen simultaneously with that printed the regular way.

There are some beautiful drawings of nude figures that appear.

Sometimes it was hard to hear the spoken words which were enmeshed with other sounds--at other moments they came to the fore. There is a thread of spoken words which weaves in and out of our consciousness.

At one point the speaker talks about employment and how to be employed requires one to be an impostor. That caught my attention.

This film has been composed, basically, through free association. I found it to be very self-indulgent. Mr. Elder has made a very private film in which he puts a lot of what he was seeing, hearing and thinking over a period of time, but he doesn't sort it out for the audience. He doesn't direct them through it or organize the material in a way that would make it accessible to a viewer. Or so it seems to me.