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Bruce Cooper was born in 1965 in Oak Park Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. He attended the University of Colorado Bolder where he earned a B.F.A. in Film Studies and Film Production. While at Colarodo University at Bolder, Cooper studied under the renowned filmmaker Stan Brakhage. Following his academic career, Bruce founded and operated the Denver Art Museum Cinema Series for four years. He worked for the San Francisco Cinematheque, and Canyon Cinema Coop. Recently, Bruce organizes and runs a monthly film screen series based in Asheville, N.C. Cooper has been teaching humanities and film at School of Living Arts in Candler, N.C.
Cooper has explored and mastered the genre of experimental film, focusing on a non-narrative and non-documentary approach to vision. His films are about visual perception, ways of seeing, which include images from nature, dreams, the lives of children, and hand crafted film abstractions. Cooper’s films have been featured in Celluloid All Magazine and have been screened at the Boston Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver Art Museum, Calgary Film Society, Film in the Cities, MN, San Francisco Cinematheque, First Person Cinema CU Boulder, as well as Eye for an I Cinema among others. Cooper’s films are represetned in the collections of Canyon Cinema and the Museum of Modern Art.
Beginning as a student of Stan Brakhage and other greats of the experimental film movement, Mr. Cooper's personal quest has been all his own. And the substance of his vision concerns no less than the spiritual nature of experience. Each of his films has offered up many images of great beauty and each seems to me to have built upon the one before for it's insights into meaning--that is, into consciousness of the divine ever-present in daily life. For me, both his full maturity as an artist and even perhaps as a seer has arrived in Kinder Rose Series. Perhaps the only way to speak of the spiritual in our time is not to speak at all -- but to be the Thing Perceived, to allow it to arise in the fluid, lovely memory that is the work of art. Anyway, that is what I believe Mr. Cooper has achieved in this latest film.
-- M.S. Mason
