Fragment of a filmmaker's work: Gunvor Nelson
Tuesday, August 23rd, 14:45h, Room 3
Wednesday, August 24th, 15:00h, Room 4
Lussas - France
Lussas' Etats Généraux du Film Documentaire festival (August 21-27) presents a partial retrospective of Swedish filmmaker Gunvor Nelson. Curated by Federico Rossin, the retrospective covers the main themes of her work, from her seminal My name is Oona (1967), one of her earlier and most known works, the impressive and deeply personal Red Shift or her recent video-exploration True to Life.
Swedish-American artist Gunvor Nelson is among the most important experimental filmmakers of her generation. Shaped by the San Francisco Bay Area scene in the fifties and sixties, she has had an enormous influence on American avant-garde film since her debut in 1965. The basic subjects of her personal, dreamlike and tactile filmmaking are: childhood, memory, the idea of home/homeland and displacement, aging and death, the female body, the material beauty of natural forces. Gunvor Nelson is one of the few Swedish artists who have been honoured with a retrospective at MOMA in New York (2006).
Click the link to read am interview to Gunvor Nelson
Programme:
- My Name Is Oona (1969, 10')
My Name is Oona was Gunvor Nelson’s final breakthrough on the American avant-garde film scene. The sound consists of Nelson’s daughter, Oona, repeating the names of the days of the week and of her saying “my name is Oona”. The latter is edited into an expressive rythmical structure that accompanies the visual structure of the film that plunges into the experience of a child. (John Sundholm)
- Moons Pool (1973, 15')
The explicit body politics in Gunvor Nelson's popular Take Off is developed further in her highly personal Moons Pool. The film begins with shots of naked bodies in a bath and transgresses into depicting male and female bodies swimming naked underwater. The latter part of the film is almost totally liberated from speech, and has a dreamlike, complex soundtrack consisting of sounds of waves, voices, water and music woven together into a seamless web of sounds. (John Sundholm)
- Red Shift (1984, 50')
Red Shift is one of Gunvor Nelson’s most admired films, a dense narrative film about family relations in which the various roles are played by members of her family. The film merges two diegetic times, both present and past, and pending between close-ups and long shots. Gunvor Nelson’s depiction of family life is both candid and considerate, displaying an amalgamation of emotions ranging from delight to distress. (John Sundholm)
- Time Being (1991, 8')
Time Being is a commemoration of Nelson’s mother. It is a depiction of her mother dying and of how the bond between them is cut off. It is a remarkable film in its ability to merge the brutality and beauty of life. After a prologue follows a series of three shots, each beginning in static takes of her mother lying in a bed at a hospital. For each shot the distance to the mother increases and the camera moves closer towards Gunvor Nelson. (John Sundholm)
- Trace Elements (2003, 10')
Trace Elements is Gunvor Nelson’s first video in which she returns to one of her prime characteristics, movement and the moving camera. Whereas both Tree-Line and Snowdrift dealt with the image as object, the focus is now on the camera as a way of seeing and discovering the world. The video shows Gunvor Nelson’s moving shadow on the floor of her studio, as if the camera was searching for its object, being occasionally interrupted by colourful close-ups of flowers and plants; shots that foreshadow True to Life. (John Sundholm)
- Frame Line (1983, 22')
Frame Line is Gunvor Nelson’s first collage film. The film that inaugurated her remarkable series of animated films, all made at the Filmworkshop in Stockholm. Frame Line is a reflection on Stockholm and Sweden, on Gunvor Nelson’s return to her native country and a place that is both familiar and distant, both beautiful and ugly at the same time. Frame Line begins with images and glimpses of Stockholm that Gunvor Nelson has collected, this audio-visual material develops into new image work in which animation becomes a way of discovering, alternating between randomness and structure. (John Sundholm)
- Light Years (1987, 28')
Light Years is the second film of Gunvor Nelson’s remarkable series of collage films in which she is blending animation with live-action. Frame Line (1983) that was the first, evolved around Stockholm and Sweden, and with Light Years, she expanded into the Swedish countryside and landscape. The film is a long journey through landscapes and images, an ingenious road-movie in which Gunvor Nelson encourages the viewer to look and to listen. (John Sundholm)
- True to Life (2006, 38')
True to Life is of substantial length and one of Gunvor Nelson’s most impressive video works. She is dragging and pushing her camera through her small garden in Kristinehamn creating a drama of colours, rhythm, life and death. True to Life is the return of Gunvor Nelson the filmmaker, albeit to a digital environment. She uses the video camera for the joy of discovering what her camera has caught, structuring the material by careful editing and a meticulous use of sound. (John Sundholm)
