World Without End - Orkney
Showing at Raleigh Film & Art Festival Oct. 5th, 2025
Shot on the scottish island of Orkney in summer 2023, the film explores the visual relationships between the ancient stone circles of the Ring of Brognar and the medieval cathedral of St. Magnus. There are interludes of water, air, earth and relected sunlight
ShowingsSun, Oct 5th, 3:00 PM @ Screening Room 2207- Runtime:0:10:00
- Director:Bruce James Cooper
https://rfaf25.eventive.org/schedule/68b20c59566d0e9ace96a25d
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05/05/24 - Review of World Without End 2 - Orkney by
M.S. Mason, formery of the Christian Science Monitor
World Without End
By M.S. Mason
Bruce Cooper’s new film “World Without End 2 - Orkney” is a visual poem that draws its imagery from
a breathtaking Romanesque church built in the 12th Century. Cooper celebrates the red and yellow sandstone bricks of the Saint Magnus cathedral in Orkney, Scotland and its surroundings low hills covered in green and purple. Nearby the water of the ocean laps against the rocks, while most impressively the ancient tall stone monuments of the Ring of Brodgar reach heavenward, stately yet mysterious.
Inside the stone church we see only the windows, light pouring through stained glass gorgeously decorated with saints and holy allegories meant to teach as well as to entertain the faithful (and the rest of us) with their stories and their symbols. In the dark we must look upward to these paragons of holiness. Meanwhile, medieval choral music followed by bagpipe music calms and underscores the stony architecture and landscape with its everlasting meaning. The film struck me as a kind of prayer, fixing my thought on the title…words that end a well-known liturgical prayer.
Because the imagery flies by quickly and while outside imagery also moves in and out of negative space like an echo from the past, the viewer is called upon to reassemble those images in the mind as we later reflect on it. The film works in consciousness exactly the way the mind works in revery. Perhaps we watch Cooper’s own thinking about his experience of Scotland and this haunting cathedral as we watch his film. But films like his are also surprising in their innate capacity to awaken longing in the viewer’s own thought. The longing for meaning, I think. Perhaps Cooper has found his in time present and time past.
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