Crack, Brutal Grief

Powerful and raw, Crack, Brutal, Grief is an impressive extension of R. Bruce Elder's obsessions with history, media culture, psychology, technology, and the cruelty found in nature. The film acts as a primal scream, literally and metaphorically. The point of departure for the film came shortly after the gruesome suicide of Elder's close friend. Elder began an investigative examination of graphic images of suicides, scenes of horror, and hard-core pornography found on the internet, which ultimately form the thesis of this cathartic expression of grief. 'Increasingly angered by the Web's banalization of suffering, I decided to fashion a compilation film, using only material from the Web that would return to the degraded images I found there the full dignity of their horror'