Gunvor Nelson (1931–2025) is a key figure in the history of experimental film internationally who sadly passed away earlier this year. This programme provides a fitting overview of the filmmaker’s practice through the lens of family relations. Key works featured here include the swirling, looping masterpiece of repetition My Name is Oona (1969) and the elegiac reminiscence Red Shift (1984). Filmform’s Andreas Bertman will introduce this tribute screening to a filmmaker who constantly found ways to revise and reconfigure her practice.
Film info:
Gunvor Nelson, My Name is Oona, 1969, 10 min.
Gunvor Nelson, Red Shift, 1984, 47 min.
Gunvor Nelson, Time Being, 1991, 5 min.
All titles courtesy of Filmform.
MY NAME IS OONA:
My Name is Oona was 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 rhythmical structure that accompanies the visual structure of the film that plunges into the experience of a child where both bliss and fear reigns. As so often in Nelson’s oeuvre there is a female subtext too: it is male voices that executes their authority upon Oona, whereas as a girl she is still equal to boys of her own age.
RED SHIFT:
Red Shift is together with Before Need Gunvor Nelson’s only narrative film. It is a painful, yet tender film, about family relations drifting apart. The change that is forced upon you when your daughter exits family life and your mother exits life altogether and you stand alone. Gunvor Nelson’s parents and her daughter performs in the film, representing different generations, while the film let the story unfold in alternating close-ups and long-shots. Throughout the candid and considerate narrative, former Pacific Film Archive director Edith Kramer reads excerpts from the book Calamity Jane’s Letters to her Daughter, adding another dimension to the amalgamation of emotions.
TIME BEING:
Time Being is a commemoration in four sequences of Nelson’s mother. The film that starts and ends with lengthy black leader, is a brutal yet beautiful depiction of her mother dying and how the bond between them is cut off. After a prologue follows 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 Nelson.
About Filmform:
Filmform is one of the oldest organizations in the world devoted to video art and experimental film and was founded in 1950 in Stockholm, Sweden, originally as an independent film co-op. Later it was re-organized into a foundation and is now the most important driving force for artists’ films and videos in Sweden – working with archiving, distribution as well as dissemination of knowledge and information. Filmform is further an important intermediary between independent filmmakers and governmental agencies and is often engaged as an advisor to museums, galleries, universities, and festivals. Constantly expanding, the distribution catalogue spans from 1924 to the present, including works by Sweden’s most prominent artists and filmmakers within the field of moving images.
Filmform has its origin in the post-war generation of artists that experienced the cinema as a new and expanding creative field. In film – personal expression, free from the regulations of convention, could maintain its independence. Artists’ films – as well as videos later on – made it possible to connect to the world and to modern times. Filmform has been the hub of artists’ films and videos since several decades. Artists like Viking Eggeling, Peter Weiss and Gunvor Nelson have been important in this process, and new names are merging continuously. It is a beautiful coincidence that the first film that was planned when the association once formed in 1950 was called Vision. The vision of artists moving images is under constant review.
