DC's

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George Jenne Various (2017)

High School Props Series: Prop Bite Face

Mine Eyes Have Seen the Gory (excerpt)

High School Props Series: Prop Drowned Face

 

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Claudia Alvarez Kids with Guns (2010 – 2012)
‘Deeply affected by the terminally ill children and elderly patients I encountered as a non-emergency ambulance driver, my painted and sculpted figures imbue sculptures of children with adult characteristics and mannerisms.’

 

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Pipilotti Rist (Entlastungen) Pipilottis Fehler ([Absolutions] Pipilotti’s Mistakes) (1988)
‘It is a nightmare; it is torture enacted over and again before the viewer’s eyes. In multiple sequences one observes the video’s female protagonist struggling against physical and psychological impediments; the physical struggles en- acted on screen are accompanied by voice-overs that speak directly to the irreconcilable gap between the woman’s efforts and reality. In one sequence the woman faints repeatedly; in another, she dives into a swimming pool only to have her head forced under water as she breaks the surface; in yet another she attempts to climb over a fence, but falls before she can propel herself over to the other side. Amidst these failures of action/volition, the video itself fails; the reception is distorted, pixilated beyond the point of verisimilitude and full of static. The woman’s trials are thus obscured from complete representation: the viewer never gets the full story, for neither does one see the woman com- plete her action, nor is one able to view these attempts uninhibited due to the treatment of the video medium itself.’

 

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Christopher Reynolds The Pleasures of the Table (2012)
Maple butcher block, mixing bowl, metal, 8 chef’s knives, magnetic knife rack, 8 aprons, metal hooks.

 

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Brody Condon DeRez FX.Kill RamDass (2005)

 

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Aida Makoto Edible Artificial Girls (2001)
‘Thank you for your shopping. Have a nice day. It all started in the year 3000 when mankind was tormonted with hunger caused by worldwide food shortages. The founder, old Aida, a molecular biologist, was distressed at the seriousness of the situation, and devoted himself day and night to his studies. Finally, he achieved a great breakthrough in generating a brandnew creature called “Edible Artificial Girls Mimi” derived from the DNA of colitis germs.

‘Mimi is very savory and rich in nutrition which the name implies. (The character pronounced Mimi is a rhyme of Bimi which denotes deliciousness.) Mimi was served all over the world. People were also touched by Mimis lovely appearance, and innocent nature, her only intention being a devotion to giving herself to fulfilling the apettite of the men. Her pure heart would be worth comparing with the hare in the ancient Indian who is said to throw its body into the fire and to become a star in the night sky.

‘Mimi with no sense of pain, and no fear of death by nature is also regarded as an ideal creature for food from the viewpoint of the humanitarian. After the emergence of Mimi, the bad habit of eating the meat of farm animals died out. Mimi, who can be your good companion or kept in food storage, has taken a firm hold within our life-style in the role of a pet. With the great development of new flavors, we can now count more than five thousand varieties of Mimi. Mimi provides most of food on the earth.’

 

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Tessa Farmer Various (2017 – 2019)
‘In Tessa Farmer’s world a mummified cat can become an entertainment complex for fairies and bugs.’

 

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Blobby Barack Cooch (2017)

 

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Olga Balema Cannibals (2015)
‘The sculptures here have ingested other former sculptures, a literal enactment of cannibalism. The round bellies of some are greedy and full, pregnant from autoerotic absorption. The latex skin of others is concave around the scaffolding of sharp and unnatural growths. Ingestion threatens the crucial fiction that subjects are autonomously contained selves, distinct from their environments, agents of their own interiority. As food moves through bodies, exterior becomes interior and vice versa; object constitutes subject and vice versa.’

 

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Lindsay Seers Swallowing Black Maria (2009)
‘Seers shows a semi-autobiographical, quasi-documentary film about her life, screened in a mock-up shed whose design is a copy of Thomas Edison’s Black Maria, his New Jersey film studio. The story is implausible, troubling, and beautifully told by ventriloquist dummy narrators. As I staggered out, someone muttered “What is she on?”‘

 

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Bagrad Badalian Insanity (2011)

 

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Chris Kerich etk_i-series/cliff (2017)
‘This project, inspired by the YouTube series Car Boys, involved the creation and destruction of kinetic sculptures in the driving game BeamNG.drive (with a few modifications). BeamNG is built to be a vehicle simulator and racing game, allowing its users to customize cars and race and crash them with realistic soft body physics. It also includes an editor, to allow players to create their own levels and scenarios to race in. To create this project, I abused the capabilities of the editor to create car-sculptures that often burst into flame immediately or caused the physics engine to severely glitch as soon as the simulation was started. By exploring conditions in the game that would be considered unlikely for an average user (cars dropped from a great height with 100x gravity, cars existing inside of one another) a space is opened up inside of what is otherwise a relatively standard driving simulator to explore and create new things. These zones of alternative creative production are extremely important in helping to explore and understand systems.’

 

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Jim Shaw Dream Object (2004)
‘I think I was half awake when I thought of this upright piano modelled after the cave monster from ‘It Conquered the World.’ Using an old piano with keys sawed off to make the mouth…’

 

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Antonio Cascos Chamizo To Eat or to be Eaten – A Guide to Cannibalism (2015)
‘Intended to promote eating humans, Antonio Cascos Chamizo’s Guide to Cannibalism provides recipes for cooking meat, and also comes with kitchenware embedded with real hair. Combining graphic and product design to challenge a “food taboo”, Chamizo created a fictional scenario in which cannibalism is socially acceptable.’ These facts are presented in a guide, which includes chopping charts for correctly butchering bodies to get the best cuts, and recipes for ways to cook the meat with other foods.

 

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Hannah Black Aeter (2018)

Aeter (Sam) (excerpt)

Aeter (Jack) (excerpt)

 

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Ofir Dor Various (2017)

Study for Cannibals

Couple on the Carpet

Study of Children playing under a Tree

Man Tied to a Tree

 

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Kristof Kintera I see, I see, I see (2009)
mechanical sculpture

 

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Sarah and Joseph Belknap Skins (2015)
‘The Belknaps might be best known for the “skins” they’ve made in the past few years, deflated silicone spheres that appear to have been shed by some unassuming moon or one of the exoplanets of deep space. A dozen The skins hang on the walls like so many jackets waiting for a chilly day. To make the skins, Joseph says, they brushed silicone onto a textured foam orb, layer by layer, as a scientist in the field might make a mold, and then they turned each one inside out. They didn’t know in advance exactly what result they’d get. That’s typical of their experimentation with materials, natural and synthetic, including graphite powder, mica flakes, and “lunar regolith simulant” – man-made moon dust.’

 

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Odd Nerdrum No Witness (2016)
‘In this horrendous piece, one participant fires a gun at the other. The bullet has left the snub-nosed pistol, but it has not yet reached its target. The entire composition is organized so that its brightest point, a cold muzzle-flash, appears blinding. Hair flying, the gunman twists in a single fluid motion, like some heraldic Hermes, so that his pose combines reaching for the holstered pistol, drawing, aiming, and firing. The victim, already bloody from a prior beating, rocks back, though the bullet has not yet hit him.’

 

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Eric Manigaud Portraits Clinique (2009)
‘Drawings that transcribe existing photographs operate on a tension between fast (the photograph fixing the image) and slow (the laborious transcription of something seen), and that contradiction is a way of probing our experience of the visual image and its claim to truth.’

 

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Zeger Reyers Rotating Kitchen (2013)
‘Artist Zeger Reyers’s latest bit of performance art, “Rotating Kitchen” takes the kitchen mess to a new level. A performer starts preparing a meal for the spectator guests, but takes a brief exit – though perhaps a second too long. The kitchen stage with food half-prepped, mise en place out in the open, and dishwasher running, then begins its ominous rotation. Terrible mashes of food and ingredients plaster the walls, and destruction to short-lived order ensues.’

 

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Jake And Dinos Chapman Adolf Hitler Golf Art (2012)
‘The Jake and Dinos Chapman work is a statue of the Nazi dictator which salutes and screams “Nein!” when a ball passes through it.The Chapman brothers’ art forms part of the Grundy Art Gallery’s Adventureland Golf exhibition, which features art works as holes on a crazy golf course.’

 

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Laurie Simmons The Love Doll (2009 – 2011)
‘To create her latest series, the artist Laurie Simmons ordered a high-end Japanese love doll—a life-sized, anatomically correct synthetic female, designed for use as an inanimate sex partner. Her photographs document an evolving friendship, ending with the arrival of a second, new doll.’

Day 1 / Day 27 (New in Box)

Day 8 (Lying on Bed)

Day 22 (20 Pounds of Jewelry)

Day 24 (Underwater)

Day 23 (Kitchen)

Day 25 (The Jump)

Day 30 (Meeting)

 

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Tony Matelli Lost and sick (1996)
Epoxy resin, plaster and paint

 

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Charlotte Caron Various (2011)

 

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Eddie Lohmeyer Scrolling Landscape in 34 NES Games #2 (2020)
‘A work of experimental glitch video that explores the relationship among nostalgia and our perception of technologically mediated landscapes. The film was created by appropriating footage of speedruns of older 8-bit video games and then editing together their scrolling landscapes into a continuously unfolding vista of gameworlds. This landscape has then been corrupted using glitch techniques to generate psychedelic abstractions that rapidly accelerate through two-dimensional space.’

 

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Johannes Kahrs Various (2004-2015)

Two Men (Kiss) (2008)

Untitled (2010)

Toter (oben) (2004)

Untitled (embrace) (2015)

Back (Sunday Afternoon) (2004)

 

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Kara Güt Intimacy Mod Supercut (2018)
‘Intimacy’s Mod is a series of mods by Kara Gut created with the aid of the “Immersive Lover’s Comfort” by flexcreator for Skyrim. By using this mod, the artist distorts the games’ original narrative and replaces it with an in-game performance carried out by the Gut herself (via her avatar) and one NPC (Non Player Character). Through the Intimacy Mod, Gut wanted to highlight the “cynicism and brutality (unintended or otherwise) of modding culture as a metaphor for our post-digital society at large, creating arresting situations of forced intimacy within a hyper-real space.”‘

 

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Fábio Magalhães Cut Bodies (2015-2016)
‘For Brazilian artist Fábio Magalhães’ hyperrealist oil paintings, the more grotesque the better. Using gruesome body horror imagery such as hacked up, barely identifiable body parts and suffocated faces in plastic bags, Magalhães’ work is as incisive as it is skillfully rendered. The breaking down of recognizably human appendages and entrails into chopped up, stomach churning chunks is purposefully reminiscent of a real-life counterpart: that of animal cruelty.’

 

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Huang Yong Ping Leviathanation (2011)
‘Huang Yong Ping’s Leviathanation is a life-size train carriage with a gigantic fiberglass fish head mounted on the front, out of which sprout stuffed animals.’

 

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Cornelia Parker Shared Fate (Oliver) (1998)
‘Here is a doll cut in half by the Guillotine that beheaded Marie Antoinette.’

 

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Michaël Borremans Various (2010 – 2018)
‘Much of Michaël Borremans‘ work is composed of people in partial states, often shown as if they were mannequins, all the while still maintaining extremely fleshy and life-like skin tones. Painting primarily with oil paints, his brushstrokes alternate between sketchy fluidity and opaque solidity that contributes to the strange atmosphere of his paintings. Borremans’ style of painting and drawing has been influenced by artists such as Manet, Degas and Velazquez. The figures in the the paintings are devoid of all identity, becoming an archetype.’

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Jack Skelley, Hey, Jacko. I guess you’re back in SoCal. And jet lagged but maybe not but probably. No doubt your tour was a triumph, and I am all twiddling fingers waiting to hear the poop on Sunday. Amsterdam was excellent, and the heat’s gone, and, gosh, the world feels okay if I don’t think too broadly. Up and at ’em, man! xo. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I know, right, about her name? I like how it makes you want to see ‘governor’ (at least when you’re an English speaking type), but it won’t let you. Love the doom merchant with a heart of gold, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Glad you liked it, pal. I agree. As a futbol looky-loo, when I’ve found myself amidst such celebrations I envy the beautiful joy of loving something so collectively with such extroversion. ** Charalampos, Hey! It was nice, yeah. I stood in that park, although it’s all torn up at the moment for some urban renewal thing, so it’s more I stood on the side of it. GbV always deliver, it’s just a matter of what. Waving at you from Paris where it just this second started pouring welcome rain. ** Adem Berbic, Nice sounding pad. Never been to Monaco, but it does seem to promise oddness of a least a little positivity if you find wealth and scrunched wealthy people curious. Ah, wonderfully relentless Merzbow. If you find a way to skip that queue, you will be famous and possibly rich. Stig Larsson? The dragon tattoo guy? Huh. You would be a highly ambitious translator, I mean, whoa. What is that thing you posted in your second comment? Is that by you? I’ve never read Proust, but it seemed Proustian? Probably not. Cue the incensed Proustians. ** ⋆˚꩜｡darbbzz⋆˚꩜｡, I’m so happy you tried out her films and liked them. I’m also happy you’re reinvigorated, and I can feel that. Good seeming move to pull out of biology. I would be extremely up for you doing a post about that, of course. Thank you mightily for offering. I really want to see ‘Backrooms’. It opens in France tomorrow, so maybe I’ll go later this week. Your thing with the crush seems to be evolving very dreamily. Fingers as crossed as you need them to be, but it sounds like my fingers are unnecessary. ‘Jefferson Airplane album cover’: wow, that gives excellent mental images. Yeah, we showed our film in Amsterdam the other day. It was good. ** Uday, Hi, Uday! I’ve been so wondering how you’ve been since our across-the-world screen-based meet up. Are you going to be there where you are/were for the summer or most of it? Excellence itself to see you! ** Steve, Haha, yes. God knows Mike knows how to put together a zine, so that’s comforting. I haven’t seen the YouTube channel. I kind to want to see ‘Backrooms’ without that background for some reason. I’m definitely not expecting miracles, but it looks odd enough. Thanks for the BoC input. I am of an open mind. ** jay, Hi. I hope whatever actor delivered the line ‘There’s a very sharp chain in my mouth, and it never comes out’ — that may not be an exact quote — did so with the ideal aplomb. That line is such a dark confessional poem last line a la Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, et al. In my imaginary recital starring you, one could hear a pin drop. ** laura w, ‘Paper Mario’ might be my favorite game franchise for some reason. Me too: if a film isn’t mostly art, I can hardly sit through it. That’s not good necessarily, but so it goes. ‘Lancelot du Lac’! Now there’s a film! ** HaRpEr //, I’m glad the introduction stuck. It is interesting that The Future Sound of London hasn’t aged well. They seemed like worlds opening at the time. I interviewed them, and they were impressively super serious about their work. Exuberance in lit is amazing and strangely quite rare tone. Go for it, absolutely. ** Paul Curran, Thank you, Paul! Academic writing, wow. I guess people need it, or a lot of people. I like reading it more than writing it, not that I have a clue how to write it. Liking the sound of the quick, shorter novel thing. And not just as a jonesing fan boy. Film-wise, Zac and I are about to start the hunt for a producer for the next film, which we’ve just finished writing. So no fun and creativity in that stressful part. Otherwise, putting together a selected short fiction book that’s been asked for, so going through old things and nitpicking for the ones that deserve to live longer. I’ll need to write one or two new things for that, so I guess that’s what I’ll be working on. I haven’t been able to come up with an exciting idea for a novel to save my life, but maybe starting short will help. Best day!!!! ** Right. I guess today’s post speaks for itself in some way? See you tomorrow.

 

‘In the recent time-based art of Gunvor Nelson, we are witness to the act of creating right before our eyes. Her work, especially the Field Studies series including Natural Features, radiates with the excitement of immediacy that is more commonly felt when viewing art such as paintings. I consider her to be the model of a film Artist although she is an accomplished film maker too. By film Artist, I mean that her work possesses the qualities of urgency and necessity that derive from an artist’s sensibility, not that of a conventional moviemaker. She has mastered the art of “single-author films.”

‘The physical and the tactile play important roles in creating the energy of immediacy I experience in Nelson’s work. These distinctive qualities also convince me of the decisiveness of her actions as an Artist as one image piles upon the next in a dense accumulation that carries the viewer deep into a prolonged instantaneous happening. She continues to work in print and paint and the physical traits of these media flow into her films and videos. Her love for the liquid quality of paint is evident in Natural Features and she does not flinch from showing us her joy and delight as she smears ink and paint around and mixes pigments with water. As a viewer of Natural Features I feel very present—rather like being near at hand while she is actually making the film. Photographs move around the frame and collages take form and are revised, altered, destroyed, and refreshed. I can intuit her moment-by-moment decisions and indecisions. I can sense her surprise of discovery when a visual accident becomes revelatory. This experience of witnessing her time-based work in the present tense is unfamiliar for a medium that normally tends to reference events that occurred in the past tense.

‘The film Art of Gunvor Nelson is both unflinching and continuously refreshing. Other artists demonstrate these qualities—Joyce Carol Oates’ writing reveals “unflinchingness” in a similar way as many of the hand-altered images in Nelson’s Natural Features display a rawness that undercuts a sensual beauty, which is also secreted there. Joe Gibbons’ 1976 film Punching Flowers shows the filmmaker beating up a rose as he purports to “put Nature in its place.” In True to Life, Nelson creates a different confrontation in her garden as her microphone audibly hits the plants. These sounds create a jarring counterpart to her exquisite investigation of unseen worlds through a close-up lens. The violent sounds underscore unexpected intrusions into her small fenced garden while simultaneously amplifying, through physical touch, an encounter between the lens and the subject.

‘Furthermore, Nelson’s films always strike me as being full of such unexpected visual and aural events. Shot after shot is so inventive that I am constantly finding myself startled. The visual elements in Nelson’s video True to Life are organized with a concern for colors and their subtle juxtaposition and inter-relationship rather than from a plot-driven approach. I don’t experience this work as an unfolding experience as I view literary films; there is no narrative arc. Instead Nelson seems to give each element equal weight. In doing so, she gives the impression of sharing with us, in real-time, her process of search and discovery in an unseen jungle.

‘Her re-working of her 1990 film Natural Features as the Natural Features times 3 triptych draws attention to her artistic process more emphatically. Sequences from the original film are isolated in digital wall frames and repeated in slower motion where more of her process is revealed. We see her arrange unlikely elements in playful and profound ways that “relentlessly refuse predictability,” to borrow Jytte Jensen’s words (Gunvor Nelson Retrospective, MoMA, 2006). Paradoxically, Gunvor Nelson has altered time and created an evolving present.

‘The inadequacy of comparable spoken or written language is apparent in one of the digital wall loops. There is no verbal equivalent to the complex and compelling moving images in which “defaced” people are encircled by a colorful toy car endlessly passing by. This sequence seems both menacing and farcical. In the act of removing people’s faces by ripping holes in the photograph, Nelson both forefronts the tactility of the ripped and scarred black-and-white photograph and undermines any illusion of filmic reality. Yet, Nelson mediates this aggressive disfigurement of the human faces with the incongruous actions and colors of the toy cars endlessly repeated.

‘Gunvor Nelson’s entire body of work is characterized by Ellen Dissanayake’s measure of art as “what is not accessible to verbal language, what cannot be said or deconstructed or erased, but nevertheless exists to be perceived by nonverbal, non-literate, pre-modern ways of knowing” (Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why, 1995). To come face to face with Nelson’s work is to be reminded that art is intrinsic to human life.’ — Alexandra Hidalgo

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Gunvor Nelson @ IMDb
Gunvor Nelson DVDs @ RE:VOIR
GN @ Light Cone
‘TIME AND LIGHT: Gunvor Nelsonʼs Vision of Editing’, by Lynne Sachs
GN @ MUBI
Fragment d’une œuvre : Gunvor Nelson
GN @ Experimental Cinema
Rêve et matière. Toucher-coller dans les films de Gunvor Nelson
The Films of Gunvor Nelson
DVD/Stream: Gunvor Nelson – Departures
Cineinfinito #73: Gunvor Nelson
Book: Gunvor Nelson and the Avant-Garde
Rêve et matière. Toucher-coller dans les films de Gunvor Nelson
The Material and the Mimetic: On Gunvor Nelson’s Personal Filmmaking
Signature, Translation and Resonance in Gunvor Nelson’s Films
“Not Evident When You First See the Object”: An Interview with Gunvor Nelson
THOUGHTS ON THE FILMS OF GUNVOR NELSON, by Lynne Sachs
GUNVOR NELSON: LA CINEASTA INESPERADA

 

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Extras

Mrs Muddle’s Trip To The Mountains With Delia Derbyshire and Gunvor Nelson

The Boy – Αθήνα (ft. Δεσποινίς Τρίχρωμη)

 

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Interview

You moved to the USA in the 1950s to study painting, among other things, but eventually film became your primary medium of expression. What was it that attracted you to film?
– I see film as a kind of choreography, movement that takes place in a defined space and time, just like in music and dance. In this time frame, the film builds up its own vocabulary, and in that way creates its own character and its own memory.

In connection with your exhibition you have chosen to highlight American avant-garde film from the 1960s and 70s in the museum collection. On two evenings, all the films shown are by women filmmakers. How have artists like Maya Deren, Chick Strand and Yoko Ono influenced you? When I went through Moderna Museet’s catalogue of films, I realized that the women filmmakers from the 1960s were largely missing.
– When I went to the USA, I first encountered the influential male filmmakers, like Stan Brakhage and Bruce Baillie. It was only later that I discovered the women filmmakers. Maya Deren travelled around the USA early on, promoting film as a means of artistic expression beyond the Hollywood industry. Chick Strand was involved in starting up Canyon Cinema, which has been crucial to avant-garde film in the USA. It is vital to give visitors the chance to also see works by women filmmakers.

SCHMEERGUNTZ from 1966 is a milestone in American feminist film history. You mix scenes from beauty pageants with close-ups from a woman’s everyday life. Could you describe the attitude to women at the time when you and Dorothy Wiley planned your film?
– The idea behind this collage was to reveal the contrast between women’s everyday existence and the image that was broadcast on American TV. We were both mothers with small children at the time and had friends who were making a film with people like Steve Reich. It occurred to us that we could make a film too. Our film was a hit at the opening on New Year’s Eve 1965–66. People were doubled over in laughter. The absurdities of everyday life became one of Dorothy Wiley’s and my specialties. And the title SCHMEERGUNTZ is a nonsense word, another absurdity.

Let’s talk about sound. You came into contact with Steve Reich’s audio works at an early stage. In several of your films you use fractions of dialogue that are barely audible, as if we were in an adjacent room or hearing echoes of the past. Can you describe the relationship between image and sound?
– I collect sounds. When you combine a certain film sequence with a certain sound you achieve a third possible dimension. I try to develop different solutions for each new film, to achieve suspense and variation. I did the cutting of MY NAME IS OONA, for instance, after first finishing the soundtrack. It’s an art to avoid simply illustrating the image with a sound. It’s also an art to dare to exclude sound entirely, as in TIME BEING.

Some of your films – for instance TIME BEING – is only shown at specific times in our cinema. Can you describe how that film was created?
– TIME BEING is about my mother at the very end of her life. When I made the film she was no longer able to communicate. It’s a very sensitive subject that I want to be treated respectfully. I wanted to make a film with a simple format. Without sound. It’s a film about my mother, but here she also represents something more. She represents human fate.

In 1993, you moved back to Sweden and decided to abandon the 16 mm film format. You contacted the video lab CRAC and now work exclusively with video and digital editing. How did that change your approach?
– The transition to video has meant that I feel more freedom technically. But I have also started filming in a more intimate way. I film “smaller” worlds than I did with 16 mm film, which involves more complex technology because you need a film lab to perform certain stages.

TRUE TO LIFE – your latest film – has several similarities with MY NAME IS OONA (1969). You create evocative dream landscapes based on an apparently simple study of nature. How did you conceive TRUE TO LIFE?
– TRUE TO LIFE was shot in my garden in Kristinehamn in Sweden. I had bought a few closeup lenses for my camera, and when I put them together I discovered another world and started filming it. Then I amplified the sound of the camera brushing against the vegetation. The title, TRUE TO LIFE, is a cliché, of course. As always, I was looking for a multifaceted title that could be interpreted in many different ways.

 

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16 of Gunvor Nelson’s 27 films

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w/ Dorothy Wiley Schmeerguntz (1965)
‘Best described by critic Ernest Callenbach as “one long raucous belch in the face of the American Home …”, Schmeerguntz, made with Dorothy Wiley, was Gunvor Nelson’s first film and instantly identified her as a compelling talent. Invented by Nelson’s father as an imaginary German word for sandwich, Schmeerguntz encapsulates the filmmaker’s overarching interest in undercutting surface layers to examine the ugly and the sublime underneath.’ — IFI

Excerpt

Excerpt

Watch the film here

 

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My Name Is Oona (1969)
‘Gunvor Nelson’s entrancing study of her young daughter is not so much a portrait as an invocation. Quicksilver montage make it impossible to discern where one image ends and another begins, richly conveying a fluid sense of a being. As much a work of sound art as a visual poem, the incantatory soundtrack (co-designed by composer Steve Reich) repurposes the childhood game of repeating a word until it turns to nonsense to evoke the enduring mystery of one’s own name (the knife’s edge of word and world).’ — Max Goldberg

Watch the film here

 

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Kirsa Nicholina (1969)
‘The film is a discovery of the eternal beauty and wonder of Nature. In extremely graphic detail, we watch the birth, becoming so involved, we’re feeling the heat and tension. KIRSA NICHOLINA is a simple, poetic statement that is fantastically involving and moving.’ — Danny Weiss

Watch the film here

 

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Five Artists: BillBobBillBillBob (1971)
‘About five of the San Francisco-based artists and their families were close friends whose careers intertwined contributes to the rare intimacy of the portraits. In order of their appearance, those profiled are painter/sculptor/filmmaker William T. Wiley, filmmaker Robert Nelson, painter William George Allan, painter/sculptor William Geis, and painter/sculptor Robert H. Hudson.’ — Film Affinity

Watch an excerpt here

 

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Take Off (1972)
‘Freaky and not a little transcendent, TAKE OFF takes the strip tease well past its usual climax. By sprinkling a little Georges Melies magic over the peep show motif, Gunvor Nelson simultaneously revels in cinema’s earliest forms while exploding the medium’s customary reliance on (and objectification of) the female body.’ — Max Goldberg

Trailer

the entire film

 

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Moon’s Pool (1973)
‘Gunvor Nelson’s oceanic lyric dissolves dualities of male and female, emotion and form, inside and outside, image and reflection. In the midst of a characteristically dense soundtrack, we hear the words: “Today, I see you see me in my body,” a cause for celebration in this literally immersive film. Utterly and pleasurably disorienting, MOON’S POOL follows the siren’s song of exploration and elation.’ — Max Goldberg

Watch the film here

 

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Frame Line (1983)
‘Frame Line is 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 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 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.’ — Film Forum

Watch an excerpt here

Watch another excerpt here

 

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Red Shift (1984)
‘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…’ — MASS ART FILM SOCIETY

Watch an excerpt here

 

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Light Years Expanding (1988)
‘Light Years Expanding is the second film of 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 Nelson expanded into the Swedish countryside and landscape.’ — Film Forum

Watch the film here

 

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Field Study #2 (1988)
‘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.’ — Film Forum

Watch an excerpt here

 

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Time Being (1991)
‘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 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 Nelson.’ — John Sundholm

Watch the film here

 

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w/ Dorothy Wiley Before Need Redressed (1994)
‘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

Trailer

Watch an excerpt here

 

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Tree-Line (1998)
‘Tree-Line is Nelson’s first video. It is based upon sound and image material that accompanied Premiere’s software at the time. Nelson simply began to play with the programme when learning how to work digitally. The starting point of the video is the soundscape and afterwards movement and the image of a tree appears. Tree-Line is a profound a reflection on the intersection of film and video, photographic (indexical) media vs. electronic media.’ — Film Forum

Watch an excerpt here

 

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Trace Elements (2003)
‘Trace Elements is 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 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.’ — Film Forum

Watch an excerpt here

 

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New Evidence (2006)
‘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

Watch an excerpt here

 

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Kristina’s Harbor Revisited (2010)
‘Gunvor Nelson’s two-part film was recorded in Kristinehamn where she grew up and will return to live.’ — NF

Watch an excerpt here

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Yes, I was going to tell you when everything is confirmed. It’s tentatively scheduled for July 31st. I’ll ask them about accessibility, but, yeah, I’d obviously love it if you can go. I was showing RT when PSG won. I guess as you probably know, the fans went crazy and rampaged through the tony part of Paris. The police are all up in arms about it, but I saw video and it looked fun. Yeah, so sucks that the current US has any part in the World Cup, but we’ll see if it can evade the monster’s control freak bullshit. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Amsterdam went really well, great screening, sold out, lots of cool people, very nice. Well, love’s pick of the leftovers isn’t too shabby either. Let me see if I can … Hello there! Welcome to the circus!!! I’m Lovesy the Clown!! A silly clown REALLY into sleeping boys!, G. ** jay, We arrived back in Paris to lovely mild temperatures, and my skin is still celebrating. How was your theater jaunt? Wow, you’re playing Chopin? Time for a recital? xo. ** Ted, Hi. Amsterdam went really well thanks. I know still images and cinematography are very different mediums, but we almost worked with a photographer as the cinematographer on RT because her photographs betray such a unique eye. It might be really interesting, that project with your friend, just to reorient your vision into thinking about the images’ duration and how they might evolve in motion? Or I don’t know. Congrats on getting the classes behind you? Did the weekend function as a fresh start? ** Laura, You gotta like a feisty slave. Well, at least when you’re not a master. The axe thing was when I was about 11, so I don’t remember. I don’t think the axe wound rebuilt my brain or anything, but how would I know, I guess? Eindhoven isn’t s exciting if I’m remembering correctly. We had no time for a rijfstafel or anything particularly Dutch, although I got some stroopwafels as a gift from a screening attendee. xo. ** Nicholas., I remember how dangerous Milk Duds were. I switched to Junior Mints pretty early on. I don’t think they’ll hurt you? But … Ouch. ** Adem Berbic, I don’t know much about the spiritual, but it does like it could be vengeful to its believers. You’re in Cannes now. I hope the heat died out there too. Dude, like I always say, let the caveman slop out the first volley and then go scientific later. You can try to suck the readers’ focus. There are tricks, but readers are also very slippery. But better to try than just write to make them generally accepting and passive. Get on Insta and launch some promo stuff. It won’t kill you, and it does help. Being in Amsterdam is weirdly powerful for me. My intense, lonely time there has given the place this heavy resonance and familiarity. I like it though. It subverts the blah. Your presumption of a Copenhagen-like Amsterdam vibe had absolutely no basis in reality based on my roughly 48 hours there. Cool, warm, smart people. ** Steve, Yes RIP Maggot Brain. I was very sorry to see that announcement on Mike’s social media. Kind of amazing that it existed in print at all and lasted for a fair amount of time. But, yeah, wonderful magazine, a real loss. I wasn’t in an area where stoned frat boys would normally hang, so I’m not sure. The Red Light District has been reduced to the size of handkerchief. That’s depressing. It was good there. Great screening. Like I said above, it’s weirdly emotional or psychologically or something-ly powerful being there for me. Since we managed to write the new script during the roll-out, I feel okay with how much it taxed our time. But now we’re basically at the end of the hosted screenings period, or at least in the US, so we can dive into the new film. It’s been okay. Ah! Everyone, Steve’s ‘latest “Radio Not Radio” episode is out. This show features Shino Yabuki, Seefeel, Nesa Azidkah, Bill Orcutt & Mabe Fratti, Elina Duni & Rob Luft, Magic Tuber Stringband, Benny Bleu, Marisa Anderson, Ted Lucas, Ed Askew, Broselmaschine, Jacqueline and Lindsay, SLIFT, Fauna, Edwin Starr, Goones, Linlin, Saint Just, Tayna, Günier Künier, Juana Rozas, Soft Cou, Charli XCX, Sonny Rollins and Cecil Taylor.’ Here. Edwin Starr -> Charli XCX -> Cecil Taylor … quite a line up. ** Paul Curran, Hi, P. Screening went great thanks. True, the proximity of ‘Closer’ and being there where writing it was my main preoccupation did create a weird, essentially good tonal overlay. You good? ** Bill, Hey. Amsterdam was good. I think by the 90s the serious weirdness and wildness up there in the 80s had pretty much been clamped down. I didn’t get around all that much, but it did seem even more populated by tourists than ever. The gay area I knew in the mid-80s on Spuistraat that once was home to 10 boy brothels and gay bars and gay bookstores and porn places and so on is completely erased now. ** Carsten, Hey. Yeah, it was fun up there and went really well. No, I’ve been back in Amsterdam a number of times since I lived there. Lots of memories there, yes. It felt very potent. Nice about the fascinating Maya article. That must have been a Carsten boon. I didn’t know that about decomposing bodies as fertiliser, but of course it makes utter sense. ** HaRpEr //, It went great, thanks. I’m about to give the new Iceage a spin, and my expectations are moderate, but that’s good to hear. I haven’t heard the Boards of Canada, but Zac is very disappointed by it. He said to him it’s such a throwback that almost feels like a self-parody. I’m going to try it. If anything, lean into your exuberance. That’ll make your work unique and give it its color and so on that will give it a long life. Uniqueness doesn’t necessarily play well in its initial life, but it’s what makes a work last. I guess obviously. ** laura w, Hi, laura. Amsterdam did everything I hoped it would do. And the heatwave is gone! Oh my god! I love ‘Thousand Year Door’. It’s one of my all-time favorite games, so I do nudge you in its direction in hopes it charms you too. No, games are really rich and instructive. I’ve learned a lot for my writing from them. ** Okay. How about we start with the week with the under known films of Gunvor Nelson and see what happens. See you tomorrow.