Prominent voices in the Canadian avant-garde cinema, Michael Snow and Bruce Elder reached turning points in their filmmaking with these ambitious and challenging works. Elder's films of the seventies are suggestive of the scope and goals his epic productions reached in the eighties, together comprising a cycle he titled "The Book of All the Dead." The Art of Worldly Wisdom (Bruce Elder, 1979, 55 mins) weaves a broad selection of images and voices into multilayered, split-screen patterns to build an account of the filmmaker at a moment of physical disease and artistic anguish. The film is an inquiry both into the nature of the romantic artist and the nature of autobiography itself. Within the year of its completion, Michael Snow's Wavelength (1967, 45 mins, from Canyon Cinema) was awarded First Prize at the 1968 International Experimental Film Festival in Belgium, and Film Culture magazine's Ninth Independent Film Award. Heralded as a classic of the underground cinema, it was voted one of the top twenty Canadian films of all times for the 1984 Festival of Festival's Northern Lights retrospective. Although Snow's film work dates back to the fifties, Wavelength marks the start of his comprehensive examination of the properties and processes of cinema. Often described accurately, if misleadingly, as a continuous 45-minute zoom across a room-experimental cinema's idea of "high concept"-it is an historical hallmark of cinematic minimalism at its paradoxically richest, most complex, and most engaging.