Gunvor Nelson

From 2015 to 2017, Lynne Sachs visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three multi-faceted artists who have embraced the moving image throughout their lives.

Gunvor Nelson stares intently at her mother Carin, a woman whose body has been devastated by the challenges of her last days on this earth. In three astute shots, Nelson looks with honesty rather than awe at a woman whose spirit has somehow flown away but whose body still demands a share of our time and our space.

A self-portrait by two women filmmakers in celebration of their friendship and filmmaking.

The film that is mostly shot underwater, in a pool, begins with footage of water and a close-up of Nelson from which we move to her body immersed in water in a bath-tub from which yet another transition occurs to a pool with male and female naked bodies swimming 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.

Frame Line is a collage film in black and white. Glimpses (both visual and audial) of Stockholm, people, gestures, flags and the Swedish national anthem appear through drawings, paintings and cut-outs. It is a film with an eerie flow between the ugly and the beautiful about returning, about roots and also about reshaping.

Experimental film with Gunvor Nelson's daughter Oona. 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 where both bliss and fear reigns.

Another feature of the new digital (and visually inferior) medium is that sound plays a much more prominent role than in most of her films. Trace Elements, Nelson’s latest work, is another “sound video”, despite the fact the camera is more active this time. It feels as though only now Nelson has totally come to grips with her new technique. She approaches the moving image again through highlighting the act of shooting. This way she continues the ever-present indexical tradition of her filmmaking despite the fact that the video is based on the idea that the camera never quite finds its target. I believe the active, searching camera in Trace Elements indicates Nelson will continue making movies for many years to come.

A collage film with sequences of live action with animation using cut-outs, found footage and pouring sands. A dark delicacy lingers. Superimpositions of dark pourings are perceived through the film. Suddenly a bright colour runs across the picture and delicate drawings flutter past. Grunts from animals are heard.

Kirsa Nicholina records the birth of a child at home by the Lamaze method. The father assists in the birth, while a physician guides him. At the moment of birth, the mother reaches down and grasps the hand of the emerging child and guides it out of her body and into her arms.

A collage film and a journey through the Swedish landscape, traversing stellar distances in units of 5878 trillion miles. It is a film acutely in the present reflecting our temporal existence ... continuous and imperfect.

This magnus opus is a domestic symphony from a woman's point of view, the portrait of a grandmother, mother and child and their home. The women and their personal objects are mostly seen alone or relating to one another (except for touching scenes of the grandmother and grandfather together). A key aspect of Red Shift is the reading of selections from Calamity Jane's "Diaries," the most narrative aspect of the film. The Diaries are read against activities seen through a window, life passing by (people walking in winter, a river flowing). They tell how Jane lost her daughter and had to survive by using her talents to act like a tough and physically competitive man...

A feature-length documentary directed by Dorothy Wiley and Gunvor Nelson about five working San Francisco artists: William T. Wiley, Robert Hudson, William Allan, William Geis and Robert Nelson-- A profile of five friends and their creative processes.

Shadows of people inhabit a wintry road, casting darkness over the tracks. What happens when this substance is washed away by fleeting reflections and blended into new matter, color and forms? And sound: feet tramping endlessly round, round like hands on a clock. This is happening now... - Sue Anne Moody

A hilarious, grotesque and grave attack on the public ideal of the American housewife.

Ellion Ness, a thoroughly professional stripper, goes through her paces, bares her body, and then, astonishingly and literally, transcends it. While the film makes a forceful political statement on the image of woman and the true meaning of stripping, the intergalactic transcendence of its ending locates it firmly within the mainstream of joyous humanism and stubborn optimism.

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“In NATURAL FEATURES Nelson mingles hundreds of still images with 3-D objects and “real” images photographed through glass layerings into a free-associative and playfully bizarre form of animation. Perhaps no film has more successfully blended an evident passion for painting with a sensitivity to filmmaking such as lush pigments alternate with and punctuate the different photographic layerings” – Steve Anker

Light Years Expanding is a further elaboration of Light Years, Nelson’s journey into the Swedish landscape in which she is blending animation with live-action. Whereas movement was one of the prime characteristics of Light Years, Light Years Expanding revolves more around the image-work, thus foreshadowing her last and most complicated collage film Natural Features.

After doing Before Need, Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley embarked on a new creative process. They revisited the film, reworked it and reassembled it creating a shorter new version, called Before Need Redressed. A way to express how the passing time, reflection and accumulating experiences can affect the form and vision of a film. —Ulf Kjell Gür

A previously unknown short by Gunvor Nelson, discovered in 2023 along with approximately 150 rolls of film in her apartment.