By Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley.
"SCHMEERGUNTZ is one long raucous belch in the face of the American Home. A society which hides its animal functions beneath a shiny public surface deserves to have such films as SCHMEERGUNTZ shown everywhere - in every PTA, every Rotary Club, every club in the land. For it is brash enough, brazen enough and funny enough to purge the soul of every harried American married woman." - Ernest Callenbach, Film Quarterly
Awards: First Prize, Ann Arbor Film Festival; Prize, Kent University Film Festival; Prize, Chicago Art Institute Film Festival.
1966, 16mm, b&w/so, 15m, $45
By Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley.
"FOG PUMAS is an updating of surrealism. It really teases the viewer because you know something is happening, but you don't know what it is. Some of the carefully composed shots are just long enough to allow involvement, and others just quick enough to be concerned with abstract graphics. The sound track has the admirable quality of being an integral part of the film." - Don Lloyd
Awards: Belgian Int'l Film Festival; Prize, Knokke-Le-Zoute, Belgium,1968.
Exhibition: Int'l Short Film Week, British Film Institute, 1968; Oberhausen Int'l Film Festival.
Collections: Museum of Modern Art, NY; Belgian Film Archives, Brussels.
1967, 16mm, color/so, 25m, $75
"That Gunvor Nelson is indeed one of the most gifted of our poetic film humanists is revealed in KIRSA NICHOLINA, her masterpiece. This deceptively simple film of a child being born to a couple in their home is an almost classic manifesto of the new sensibility, a proud affirmation of man amidst technology, genocide, and ecological destruction. Birth is presented not as an antiseptic, 'medical' experience (the usual birth film focuses on an anonymous vagina appropriately surrounded by a white shroud) but as a living-through of a primitive mystery, a spiritual celebration, a rite of passage. True to the newest sensibility, it does not aggressively proselytize but conveys its ideology by force of example. With husband and friends quietly present, the strikingly pretty young woman, in fetching terrycloth and red socks, is practically nude throughout; her whole body is seen at times, and for once the continuity between lovepartner and birth-giver is maintained; she remains 'erotic.' We never once forget that she is a woman and that the new life came from sexual desire ...." - Amos Vogel, The Village Voice
Award: Diplomate, Oberhausen Film Festival
Exhibition: National Theatre, London; Finnish and Swedish TV.
1969, 16mm, color/so, 16m, $45
"But the revelation of the program is Gunvor Nelson, true poetess of the visual cinema. MY NAME IS OONA captures in haunting, intensely lyrical images fragments of the coming to consciousness of a child girl. A series of extremely brief flashes of her moving through night-lit space or woods in sensuous negative, separated by rapid fades into blackness, burst upon us like a fairy-tale princess, with a late sun only partially outlining her and the animal in silvery filigree against the encroaching darkness; one of the most perfect recent examples of poetic cinema. Throughout the entire film, the girl, compulsively and as if in awe, repeats her name, until it becomes a magic incantation of self-realization." - Amos Vogel, The Village Voice
"It is one of the first filmic masterpieces of the new wave films." - Larry Jordan
Exhibition: Oberhausen Film Festival; BBC TV; CBS TV; Cannes Film Festival. Sold to French TV.
1969, 16mm, b&w/so, 10m, $30
Bill Wiley/Bob Nelson/Bill Allan/Bill Geis/Bob Hudson.
By Dorothy Wiley and Gunvor Nelson.
This film of five California painters, sculptors and filmmakers is a personal look at the lives of these close friends at home with their families, at work in the studio, teaching, fishing, drawing together, at parties, openings, etc. The sound is a collage of comments and music by the artists mixed with impressions by friends and acquaintances.
"FIVE ARTISTS is the most beautiful and moving film on artists that I have ever seen." - Joseph Raffael
"I just love looking at my friends on film." - Dorothy Wiley
"I hate the idea of the film and I never want to see it."
"Our part was the best." - Cornelia Hudson
"Have you ever thought about perambulators? Well, I always thought people shouldn't push other people around." - Bill Geis
"I had to be 35 years old before I realized I was leaving my childhood." - Bill Allan
1971, 16mm, color/so, 70m, $135
Co-maker: Freude
A self-portrait by two women filmmakers in celebration of their friendship and filmmaking.
1972, 16mm, color/so, 4m, $20
Starring Ellion Ness.
A dance, a documentary, a metaphysical strip tease.
"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." - B. Ruby Rich, Chicago Art Institute
Awards: First Prize, Berkeley Film Festival; Prize, Ann Arbor Film Festival; Humboldt State Film Festival.
1972, 16mm, b&w/so, 10m, $30
"A masterful and lyrical use of the film medium to portray the search for identity and resolution of self. Photographed under water, live bodies are intercut with natural landscapes creating powerful mood changes and images surfaced from the unconscious." - Freude Bartlett
Awards: First Prize, Bellevue Film Festival; Bijou Film Festival; American Film Festival, NY.
Exhibition: BBC TV; National Film Theatre, London.
1973, 16mm, color/so, 15m, $45
TROLLSTENEN, laced with memories and dreams from the past, is a multilayered personal documentary of the life of my parents and family in Sweden.
1973-1976, 16mm, color/so, 120m, $175
By Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley.
Starring: Cleta Wiley and John Nesci; Silver Spangled Hamburg and White Faced Black Spanish; Saun Ellis and Marcus Mislin; The Bog People and Queen Elizabeth; Oona Nelson and Ethan Wiley; Niagra Falls and Thou Shalt Bible; Experts and Jungle Sounds; Games, Puzzles, Surprises; Sea and Scab; Ray Rodrique and Vacuum Cleaner.
We started with some dream images, a few actors, friends, and relatives. The snow had melted and it was impossible to repeat. Standards of Perfection applied to all the selves, the relationships, the layers of memory. Where are the tables for one?
"Suddenly unfolds before one's eyes a pictorial work, as taut, complexly rich and beyond verbal logic, working as a music piece of Penderecki or Cage. I think the picture web about time and death language belongs to the most complete that the experimental film has reached." - a translation from Carl Henrik Svenstedt's article, Expressen (daily Swedish National newspaper), January 1980
1979, 16mm, color/so, 75m, $135
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.
"Distilled bits of psyche break from the assemblage to skitter across struggling places seeking niches and forming patterns with careening desperation .... FRAME LINE takes advantage to radically ignore any limits of emotional expression. Without excuses, or so much as even a token glance back, FRAME LINE at once sets standards that put to rest that silly notion 'the tradition of the Avant-Garde.'" - Rock Ross, Reversal
1984, 16mm, b&w/so, 22m, $65
Starring: Carin Grundel, Oona Nelson, Gunvor Nelson, Regine Grundel, Ulla Moberg, Gunnar Grundel.
Assistant: Diane Kitchen
RED SHIFT is a film in black and white about relationships, generations and time. The subtitle is ALL EXPECTION. The movement of a luminous body toward and away from us can be found in its spectral lines. A shift toward red occurs with anybody that is self-luminous and receding. There is uncertainty about how much observable material exists.
"It involves Gunvor Nelson, her mother and her daughter. Carefully and with great tenderness, it focuses on these three women, trying to show us their relationship, succeeding with an emotional impact that is hardly ever found in such a subject. It is not the social context which is exploited but the little gestures, everyday events. RED SHIFT is a radical film; it sets new measures for avant-garde filmmaking dealing with personal problems." - Alf Bold, The Arsenal, Berlin
1984, 16mm, b&w/so, 50m, $135
LIGHT YEARS is 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.
"LIGHT YEARS continues to develop the concerns and techniques begun in her earlier film FRAME LINE. In LIGHT YEARS Nelson blends collage animation with highly textured live-action material to create a haunting evocation of her displacement from her native Swedish culture. Particularly striking is her use of wet ink on glass to create a constantly shifting image of a path leading to a house. With these passages of the house and moving images of the Swedish landscape as threads, LIGHT YEARS becomes a tapestry of change as experienced through constant motion. It is a personal reflection on the filmmaker's memories of her past.
"The film is so filled with visual ideas that Gunvor Nelson has extended the film's themes and techniques in her subsequent effort LIGHT YEARS EXPANDING. All her recent films suggest that while the distance of time makes home further, the intensity of memory makes it richer." - Parabola
1987, 16mm, color/so, 28m, $80
Traversing stellar distances continues.
1987, 16mm, color/so, 25m, $75
Another collage film. Part of the on-going series of "Field Studies" (which includes FRAME LINE, LIGHT YEARS, and LIGHT YEARS EXPANDING) combining live action with animation. Superimpositions of dark pourings are perceived through the film. Suddenly a bright color runs across the picture and delicate drawings flutter past. Grunts from animals are heard.
1988, 16mm, color/so, 8m, $25
The fifth in the series of collage films I call "field studies." Here I used cut-outs, photographs, mirrors, water, toys, paint, ink ... in many different combinations. The central theme is faces. A dark delicacy lingers.
"Her path sets to differentiating and pulling into perception what might have previously been unsought or repressed. She creates a view just beneath the surface that glimpses this hitherto forgotten or perhaps privatized terrain. We are surprised, coaxed, reminded and invented ...." - Crosby McCloy
"In NATURAL FEATURES, Swedish-born Nelson mingles hundreds of still images with 3-D objects and 'real' (though distorted) 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 as lush pigments alternate with and punctuate the different photographic layerings." - Steve Anker
1990, 16mm, color/so, 30m, $90
"This extraordinary film manages to craft a delicate portrait of her mother through time and refracted light while unfolding in purple silence the relationship of Nelson and her mother as well." - Crosby McCloy
1991, 16mm, b&w/si, 8m, $25
"Gunvor Nelson's two-part film was recorded in Kristinehamn where she grew up and will return to live. KRISTINA'S HARBOR is an impressionistic depiction of daily life in this small Swedish city, suggesting how it has or has not changed in relation to its history." - Steve Anker
"In Nelson's cinema of evocation we shift from past to present ... from the flat space of the film frame to the three-dimensionality of objects. Constructed through collaging snapshots, live-action footage and small objects, and through painting on glass and photographs, Nelson's beautiful, enigmatic animations have a personal vocabulary of the found, the made, the remembered, the imagined." - Kathy Geritz
1992, 16mm, color/so, 50m, $135
"OLD DIGS is an inner journey through the sights and sounds of Kristinehamn as reflected in its central river." - Steve Anker
1992, 16mm, color/so, 20m, $60
Note: KRISTINA'S HARBOR and OLD DIGS may be rented together for $100.
Fourteen years after making BEFORE NEED, Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley entered into a fascinating process. They revisited the film, reworked and reedited it, making a new and shorter version, called BEFORE NEED RE-DRESSED. It is an interesting excursion into how passing time, further experience, and time for reflection can affect and alter the shape and vision of a film.
1995, 16mm, color/so, 42m, $120