Filmmaker R. Bruce Elder’s Alone (All Flesh Shall See It Together) is an art film, an avant-garde film if you will, but to hear him talk about it, it’s all about the sound.
As he pointed out in an email, “[…] Alone (All Flesh Shall See It Together) is more closely related to Finnegans Wake than any other work I have made — like the Wake, it is piece that draws on the experience of radio transmission and electric flows (and that makes my understanding of nature of sound the key shaping force).”
R. Bruce Elder, FRSC is a Canadian filmmaker, and the author of critical works on film and art, who first rose to international prominence as an avant-garde filmmaker in the 1980s. For many years, he also taught at the now Toronto Metropolitan University. His work was recognized by a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2007, and he was elected to the Royal Society of Canada.
A February 15, 2026 screening of the film took place at the Factory Media Centre in Hamilton, a non-profit housed in a former industrial building on Victoria Street North. The location was fortuitous, as Elder noted. Nikola Tesla played a key role in bringing electricity to Ontario, and in the late 1800s, the Hamilton location was the first building lit with Tesla’s alternating current electricity, transmitted from his ground breaking DeCew | Power Generating Station on the Welland Canal 56 km away.
“You will notice some very Tesla-espque imagery,” he commented during his remarks prior to the screening.
Electricity plays a vital role in the film.
The film itself is a form of electromorphic art, as he explained. It stems from electrology, or a way of understanding reality via electromagnetic technology. “It’s made up of energy flows,” he explains. “No wave form ever closes. And, that means that time is co-existant.”
Energy endures, he noted. It leads to his optimistic reading of digital technology — which has its undeniable dark side. Perhaps we can harness positive energy collectively, across time and space. Perhaps we can use it to create love and community to counter the violence of authoritarianism.
The Film
“I consider this type of film I’m making electric poetry.”
The film unfolds in a flow of images, punctuated by texts, excerpts from a poem. As Elder explained in the Q&A after the screening, he wrote the poem first. The text appears in a gothic script on the screen, each excerpt consisting of a line or a few lines. Some of it read with a kind of historical voice, congruent with the gothic letters, while other parts were more modern in expression.
There are five essential sections to the film. The first begins with single images, the second proceeds with two, then three and four, and the fifth section offers a multiplicity of images. As the sections progress, there is also more and more digital manipulation, which he actually shows in a few segments that depict an image in several versions — the original, a fractal version, and other digital manipulations, each displayed in a separate screen within a screen.
The kinds of images are myriad, often repeated, sometimes digitally manipulated in various ways, and multiplied. The format of the film also changes, sometimes in a conventional horizontal orientation, other times, in a vertical formation, or as two smaller screens side by side.
What kind of images?
The flow begins with images of a church, both the exterior and the interior, including the altar, sculptures and other decorative elements. There are scenes from the grounds, and a garden, most taken during a trip to Seville, Spain.
There are outdoor scenes that look much closer to home (he’s based in Toronto), views of the power lines along train tracks, and the human form, including both historical images of nude figures (presumably from naturist gatherings), and Elder himself as model while someone else films him.
Among other things.
There are scenes of lightning and electric forms, some of them created with a miniature Tesla coil that he and his team constructed for the film.
The complex flow of images are a visual representation of the underlying concept — that the past is connected to the future, that time can flow in reverse, that natural and manmade forms can blend together. Everything is everything.
The kinetic soundtrack was largely created by Ajla Odobašić, a former student of Elder’s at Toronto Metropolitan University, and mixed to 5.2 surround sound.
The sounds flow along with the images, including background noises, trains, birdsongs, bits of music both very modern and recognizable, and narration of some of the lines from the poem. The sounds, particularly the narration, often overlap each other in different voices, and come from different spaces within the surround sound environment.
Elder on Elder
His invitation to the screening explains, “We all know that electric media have produced numerous degrading, all-pervasive forms of surveillance that have virtually eliminated that privacy which heretofore was a bastion of human dignity. But is it possible that electric media and their capacities for openness and revelation might result in a new form of transcendence?
“This question constitutes the problematic of ALONE (ALL FLESH SHALL SEE IT TOGETHER) and the poem at the core of the work. The project embodies our (R. Bruce Elder and Ajla Odobašić’s) imaginings of what the electric poetry of the future might be: a multi-focal, multi-medial form whose nature reflects the interpenetration of all energies everywhere and throughout time — an ethereal togetherness.”
He expanded on the idea during pre- and post-screening comments, using references largely from poetry (notably poet Kenneth Rexroth, and Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan) to contextualize his thoughts.
“It’s as though time and space were a continuum,” he said. The energy of an event in the past resonates into the future. “As we get farther away, they grow weaker, but do not disappear,” he continued. “The future contained in the past […] that’s the conception of time that went into the construction of the soundtrack to this film.”
Final Thoughts
The film stills he provided for this feature focus, as he notes, “on images that suggest the work’s “electric/digital” genesis; images suggesting Indra’s Net — images within images within images — which, I take to be implicit in the metaphysics of energy, and at the same time suggest the longing for transcendent that motivated to the work.”
While digital media has, and continues to, play a large role in fostering the current divisive state of the world, Elder persists in imagining a different result. Digital media can also bring us together, both across time and space.
“The conditions are set for us to know each other intimately, and […] merge,” he said.
“This film is an effort to bring about that possibility.”
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