Canadian filmmaker, writer and critic R.Bruce Elder has been awarded the eighth annual Robert Motherwell Book Award for his book Harmony + Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008), a 'remarkably ambitious, wide-ranging, and thoroughly researched study that opens new perspectives on the development of modernism and on the central role of cinema in that development.' The award honors each year an outstanding publication in the history and criticism of modernism in the arts.

R.Bruce Elder is the author of the books Image & Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture, The Body in Film, A Body of Vision, and The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson, among many ither publications and articles.