Illuminated Texts

‘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 irrevocable past and terrible velocity of time. Following on Elder’s previous films, the autobiographical ‘The Art of Wordly Wisdom’, and the structural essay in history, 1857 (Fool’s Gold), illuminated Texts re-enacts, 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 overs- and proliferate in the range of his imagery, Elder has constructed ‘Illuminated Texts’ classically as 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, Programme Notes for Canadian Images, 1983.