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“My name is Gunvor”

“Gunvor Nelson is one of the most gifted new film humanists…” Film as a Subversive Art, Amos Vogel (1974)

The film title, MY NAME IS OONA, appears in capital letters, white on black, in the upper centre of the image, with a caption underneath identifying the director: Gunvor Grundel Nelson. Then, a little girl with long blonde hair smiles at the camera in close- up. The faint swaying of the framing, the girl’s empathetic expression -she’s missing one of her front teeth- and the side light filtered behind her give the portrait a playful, family look, accentuated by the use of 16mm black and white film. When the shot starts to fade slowly to black, an off screen soundtrack begins, on which, while the girl laughs and babbles inaudibly, we hear what we suppose is her voice which, stressing each word, says: MY… NAME… IS… OONA. From here on, a series of shots interspersed between black follow the girl’s movements as she runs around the camera, while on a loop we can hear, with a slight reverberation, the girl’s name: Oona Oona Oona. The sound overlaps, creating an echo, while different camera movements show tree branches in negative and these are overlaid, using transparency, with close-ups of the little girl looking very serious and others in which she is running about, at times in slow motion and at times superimposed with up to three different images of herself jumping, throwing herself on the ground, playing

My Name is Oona

Those are, approximately, the first three minutes of My name is Oona, a film made in 1969 by Gunvor Nelson, featuring her six-year old daughter Oona. The detail in the above description illustrates two of the most notable aspects of Nelson’s work: on the one hand, the physical and emotional closeness between the filmmaker and the themes and subjects she films; on the other, the rigour and the desire for experiment when combining image and sound. A work like My name is Oona merges these questions in an exemplary way. The director elaborately manipulates the sound and image tracks to reproduce a child’s imagination, consisting of a playful, repetitive and at times nightmarish world. The rhythmic cadence and the sophisticated  audiovisual structure devised by Nelson transmits in a creative way something as fleeting and immanent as children’s games. Interest in exploring cinema’s potential as a perceptive medium is a constant in Gunvor Nelson’s films. Throughout her career she would see cinematic mechanisms as a meeting place between the person and the immediate world around him.

“Content, emotion, should be priorities”

“I discovered how lovely things look through the camera. Seeing a neighbour’s dirty kitchen in reality and then discovering how it became something beautiful through the camera provoked a kind of euphoria in us. A melon or dirty plates, seen in close-up with a lens, became something different. We had great fun looking at the world that way. (…) The camera became binoculars: you focus on a little area and you isolate it, and it becomes something beautiful because it’s been selected. That process of selection is what makes a film.” (Gunvor Nelson in Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 3. Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, p. 186)

With these words Gunvor Nelson, a painter by training, summarized her jump to cinematic creation in the 60s. These reflections prefigured one of the most outstanding characteristics of her work: the camera as a tool for celebrating and discovering the world; the camera, those filmic “binoculars”, as a magnification capable not only of highlighting but of constructing the beauty of what is in front of the lens. Nelson’s audiovisual work, unknown to the general public and to most critics and experts, and practically unseen in Spain, is based on that radical approach to everyday matters, in which cinematic art is capable of revealing and transmitting an unsuspected beauty. Despite being classified traditionally within what is known as avant-garde cinema or experimental cinema, Nelson prefers to talk about a “personal cinema” when referring to her work, a work of exceptional variety and intensity, always made with a stylistic coherence and formal freedom that are commendable and surprising. Even within avant-garde cinema, Nelson’s filmography is remarkable in its emphatic search for a personal path, returning time and again to her everyday surroundings as a main theme. Nelson makes each film as a unique formal exercise, in which image and sound generate a tactile, material, pictorial space around the materials with which she has chosen to work. In this way, Nelson’s films and videos are constructed like a series of visual and sound layers which interact between themselves, generating diverse meanings in which animation, interplay of transparencies and collage become the favourite techniques for suggesting a plurality of sensations, atmospheres and meanings.

“I carry this album tied to the saddle, and the ink in my pocket to be able to write to you next to the campfire. My ink has frozen so many times that it’s almost useless.” Letters to a daughter. Calamity Jane Fragment reproduced in Red Shift (1984)

Born in 1931, Gunvor Grundel Nelson studied Fine Arts in Stockholm in the early 50s, before emigrating to California in 1953 to study painting. In 1958 she married Robert Nelson, also an artist. They spent all that year  travelling in Spain, before settling near San Francisco and collaborating on the shooting of Bob Nelson’s first film, Building Muir Beach House (1961), and jointly finishing Last Week at Oona’s Bath (1962), a parody of Last Year in Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961), which was already showing some of what would be the direction of her later solo film work: family, work about the female body, and humour, which would always be present, in different ways and tones, throughout her filmography. In 1965 she finished her first film, Schmeerguntz, filmed together with her neighbor and fellow artist Dorothy Wiley and premiered on New Year’s Eve that same year. Since then, Nelson has made almost thirty films, the great majority of them on 16mm and, since the early 90s, on video.

Schmeerguntz

As she herself recognized in an interview in 2011, on the occasion of a retrospective organized in Lussas, France, freedom has always been the true framework of her films, and her only guide: “When I started I had many years of apprenticeship in art schools behind me, but no experience in cinema, nor any expectations, so I was completely free to experiment. I only wanted to express myself as an artist. We had great fun making Schmeerguntz, a film riddled with absurdities, because life is like that too. It was very well received, and I gradually learned more about the avant-garde film scene, but that didn’t change my attitude with regard to the act of filming: it was simply a matter of developing my more personal style”. (“Fragment of a filmmaker’s work: Gunvor Nelson”, Federico Rossin)

Since that first film, quickly linked to the feminist movement in the 60s because of its humorous-critical editing which contrasts American beauty queens with the daily scatology inherent to young mothers (changing nappies, morning sickness, cleaning up rubbish), Nelson has explored the female body and condition. Thus, she has explored in films such as Red Shift (1984) the historic and family traditions that perpetuate certain ways of being a woman, or she has reflected on the links, both physical and emotional, that unite her to the women who have gone before her, as in the monumental Time Being (1991), about her mother’s last breaths, or the above mentioned My Name is Oona, for example.

Red Shift

Along with that work with the family, the home and childhood landscapes, seen as a lost, irretrievable homeland, Nelson has developed a work that is close to a sensorial, material, poetic surrealism, in which the images obtained with the camera peel away from realist representation, whether through random movements that convert the real into abstract, or through a process of pictorial manipulation which goes much farther with the works of painting on celluloid started by Stan Brakhage, another artist from her generation. A surreal exploration of the mental and emotional landscapes in which Nelson gives special importance to sound, which contradicts or underlines “what there is”, as Nelson calls the elements which the filmmaker uses to elaborate her work. The director explained it like this in some notes for an editing class.

“Surprising solutions can be achieved even with the most “deficient” material, if you let it talk to you; if you learn what there really is in the film. You should be patient, become familiar with each frame, without ignoring any mistake or detail. During this period it is essential to look for what there really is – as opposed to the romantic, preconceived idea of what you would like there to be” (reproduced in the catalogue Evidence. Gunvor Nelson, p. 32, our emphasis).

Nelson’s notes from her time as a lecturer –first in the San Francisco State College (later San Francisco State University) and then in the San Francisco Art Institute from 1969 to 1992- reveal the director’s didactic interest, as well as her artistic commitment to her work and her students. Nelson’s artistic practice is based, therefore, on a poetic concept, in the philosophic meaning of the term, of filmmaking. Through the observation and transformation of small gestures, Nelson’s cinema imagines the creative process as an intimate relationship with the world, in which knowledge is inseparable from a playful component.

“When seeing avant-garde cinema, it is essential to suspend questions such as “where are we going”, “how is it going to end”, and perceive the fundamental experience of the film in itself” (Gunvor Nelson’s class notes, ibidem, pp.8)

The ways of grouping and presenting Gunvor Nelson’s works are tremendously complex. Her career allows for divisions according to geography (her works in the USA, 1965-1979, and those done in Sweden, 1983-present), themes (the family films concerning women and those which observe nature) and style (visual collages and films with linear editing). Known on the experimental circuit for her strict technical control and for an almost obsessive interest in projection conditions, Nelson has also expanded, re-elaborated or re-edited several of her previous works. That is the case with the diptych Light Years and Light Years Expanding, both variations made in 1987 on the Swedish landscape and the decomposition of nature; with Before Need (1979, co-directed with Dorothy Wiley), reconverted into Before Need Redressed 16 years later and 33  minutes shorter; or with Natural Features (1990) an intense film of mirrors and association transformed in 2011 into Natural Features times 3, an installation with three projections in loop in which fragments of the “original” Natural Features are broken up and edited differently in each of the three videos in order to facilitate the legibility of the 1990 film. Nelson shows herself to be a tireless worker, totally dedicated to her art. Thanks to researchers and programmers such as John Sundholm or Steve Anker, Gunvor Nelson’s work has been recovered and is the object of greater attention in recent years, both in the United States and in Europe. A tireless worker in her home-studio in Kristinehammer, whose tiny back garden she reproduces magnificently in True to Life (2006), one of her latest and most beautiful explorations, Nelson is one of the most rigorous, exciting and surprising filmmakers on the international scene.

Take Off

The mini-season that we are presenting here includes three sessions dealing with Nelson’s wide-ranging, varied trajectory. The first session includes some of the Swedish filmmaker’s best known titles, such as Take Off (1972), My Name is Oona or Schmeerguntz, all belonging to Nelson’s learning process in filming. These titles reflect a strong influence by the experimental ideas of the artists on the west coast of the U.S. Nelson and her husband Bob joined the art scene along with filmmakers such as Bruce Baillie, founder of the distribution company Canyon Cinema and a key figure in the start of Nelson’s film career. The session closes with Frame Line (1983), Nelson’s first film collage on her return to Sweden in the 80s.

The second session brings the spectator face to face with Nelson’s intimate circle. From the generational confrontation of Red Shift to the tracking, camera in hand, of the flowers in the artist’s garden, the screening shows the thematic and physical closeness that unites Nelson with the subjects and objects filmed. In this closeness, the director is capable of extracting a vibrant dialogue not without an intensity that is almost violent.

Finally the third session works on the vision of nature in some of Nelson’s films. A professed surrealist, Nelson sees co-existence with nature as a changing process, in which beauty comes precisely from inalienable mutations to organic life.

Moonspool

Finally we want to express our gratitude for the collaboration by Gunvor Nelson and Professor John Sundholm, an expert in Nelson’s work, in preparing this mini-season. Though multiple e-mails and conversations, the intellectual exchange with both has enriched our ideas and opinions of the nature of cinema as an artistic experience and the possibilities of life change. Quoting another of Gunvor’s very sound reflections, “If you don’t look at life in close-up, you’re not really looking at it. And if there isn’t a variety of experiences, things get boring, don’t they?” (MacDonald, íbidem, p. 194)

Books and catalogues on Gunvor Nelson

Kristinehamns Konstmuseum (2011). Gunvor Nelson. alltintill NEAR. Kristinehamns: Kristinehamns Konstmuseum.

Moody, Sue Anne (ed., 2006). Evidence. Gunvor Nelson. Karlstad: Film i Värmland.

Sundholm, John (ed., 2002). Gunvor Nelson. Still Moving / I Ljud och Bild. Karlstad: Karlstad University.

Sundholm, John (ed., 2003). Gunvor Nelson and the Avant-Garde. Viena: Peter Lang.

 

Miguel Fernández Labayen and Gonzalo de Pedro

Article originally published in the catalogue of the Seville European Film Festival 2016