by Astrid Soderbergh Widding
Gunvor Nelson: most Swedes probably don't know the name. Even within Swedish film circles there has been a troubling lack of knowledge about Gunvor Grundel Nelson's importance to the medium. The University of Karlstad's 2002 hosting of an international conference and retrospective of Nelson's roughly twenty films and videos thus offered a welcome chance to introduce anew someone who is a leader within the international avantgarde. Nelson's work is deeply rooted in her homeland (and not least in her home town, Kristinehamn)-witness trace elements in many of the films she made even during the years she worked in California.
The (characteristically bilingual) catalogue, Still Moving-I ljud och bild (Still Moving-In Sound and Image), published by Karlstad University in conjunction with the conference, with John Sundholm as editor, presents Gunvor Nelson's work from several points of view. It's clear how much in her life, as in her work, was unplanned, beginning with her study of art in the U.S. that led to her marriage to a San Francisco artist. Her work in film began almost accidentally as well: together with her friend and neighbor Dorothy Wiley (also married to an artist), Gunvor collaborated on the prize-winning Schmeerguntz (1963) (the title comes from her father's nonsense language: it's a homemade, German-sounding word for sandwich). Some argue that this film is an example of early feminist filmmaking; Nelson herself maintains that the film had no origin in feminist consciousness. For her it simply shows-sometimes straightforwardly, sometimes almost grotesquely-the physical experiences of women: we see pregnancy, morning sickness, the "schmutz" wiped from a baby's bottom, a discarded sanitary napkin, all cut together with advertising images of models and beauty contest contestants. At the time, San Francisco cinematheque curator Steve Anker wrote that Schmeerguntz "created a rapidfire attack on the most cherished of all American icons: motherhood and the home."2 Nelson and Wiley's next collaboration resulted in Fog Pumas (1967). This film was also, in many ways, an attack on established conventions of film narrative, through characteristically surrealist images that undercut logical narrative connections while the film simultaneously conveyed a healthy, quotidian sense of comedy. The images joined together, tentatively, loosely, dreamily, absurdly. . . .
Nelson begins to explore her own method of film expression in her next films (though she would also return to collaboration with Wiley). At first the results were uneven, as Nelson herself admits: " . . . as I jumped into different projects I had to find what that particular film needed."3 Some viewers may have found her constant searching for new means of visual and auditory expression "schizophrenic or a bit unstable."4 But the fact is that, over the years, this casting about has resulted in an impressive plainness and clarity of expression able both to cultivate repeating traits and to find new, unexpected, forms.
My Name Is Oona (1969) is one of the most memorable of her early films. Here Nelson's own daughter and a horse play leading roles. The sound track lingers in the mind, combined with the image track's dreamlike mystery: the insistent, rhythmic repeating of the title sentence, "My name is Oona, Oona, Oona." Sound plays a key role in Nelson's later work as well, often in the form of peeled-off, dissonant resonances-vocal, instrumental, or everyday sounds-that either work together with the images or simply overpower them. With Nelson's films there is no clear hierarchy of expressive registers. The ten-minute film Take Off (1972) became a success: an obviously mature stripper is seen, first going through her anticipated routine, then stripping off her own body. One body part after another disappears as if in a Mis trick, calling silent film to mind. Take Off became the biggest success since Nelson's debut: clearly here, as in Schmeerguntz, she had brushed up against several touchy subjects and accurately sketched a portrait of the comparatively exposed position women occupy in commercial visual contexts.
During the 1970s Nelson continued with two films: Trollstenen (1973-76), a portrait of her family, and Before Need (1979), again in collaboration with Dorothy Wiley. In the latter work, Nelson for the first time crystallizes what will be her own, personal, language of images. Here detailed images in closeup can be found that over time have come to be understood as uniquely Nelson-esque, images of extraordinarily palpable colors, forms, materials. It's possible, however, that Nelson's drive to express herself during this period was out of balance with the results she achieved. The film was re-edited fifteen years later, as Before Need Redressed (1994), with an exceptionally detailed look at the specific. Here the painterly themes/motives that were already appreciable in the earlier piece are cultivated into, in Steve Anker's words, "a world in which ordinary objects become part of a cabinet of visual marvels: the orange of tomatoes, the gold of olive oil, the rich red head of a rooster, purple grapes, a small metal box enclosing a butterfly, multicolored marble are all vividly portrayed through deeply rendered color tones."5
The later films-usually regarded as starting with Frame Line (1973) and continuing to the latest video, Snowdrift (2000)-encompass ten films made over ten years. Nelson's mature filmmaking is impressive, even if every film at the same time has its own special dimension, its own particular address. Among the more exceptional productions is Time Being (1991), a portrait of Nelson's mother on her deathbed; it begins with a shot in extreme close-up: her mother's face in profile moving slightly with each breath. One cannot rein in a loved one's dying to suit the dictates of conventional story-telling.
Long before this, Nelson had made Red Shift (1984), simultaneously an unforgiving and a caring portrait of the relationships between mothers and daughters over the decades: Nelson's own mother, she herself, her own daughter, and two other women who play a young mother and that woman's mother in turn. Fragmented enactments from different time spans are interlaced with a reading of Calamity Jane's diary from the late 1800s: we hear the letters Jane writes to her daughter from whom she was forced to live apart. All is told in black-and-white images that are crystal clear yet many-faceted in their complex scale of nuances. Concrete, ordinary details are always important for Nelson, as here for example the fingering of objects in jewelry boxes or a hand which again and again polishes an old mirror. Perhaps most beautiful are the film's snapshots of the meeting between mother and daughter, as when Gunvor repeatedly, searchingly, tentatively, awkwardly-in close-up- strokes her mother's rouged cheek and her mother's face suddenly lights up in a smile.
A completely banal everyday scene, such as the image of hands in a dishpan, suddenly disappears into abstraction: unexpectedly the scrubber acquires a life of its own and the film follows it in a slightly absurd, Léger-like Ballet mecanique, where an object embarks on its own dance. This reciprocal action between the concrete and the abstract, where the simplest details betray hidden meanings, is highly typical of Nelson's later films. Every image, every person, every thing, stands out in a kind of previously unnoticed uniqueness, as a mystery worthy of attention.
It's tempting to believe that Nelson's many years living and working in the U.S. gave her an entirely special relationship both to her home region of Vrmland and to her family in Sweden. She seems to see everything from a distance, and at the same time with endless respect and devotion. It's striking how often she comes back to her home in her films-but apparently only to find that her home has become in part unheimlich, foreign. Many of the Swedish exchanges in Red Shift, for example, sound surprisingly stilted. But in this estrangement there's also a freshness, a renewed look: in Old Digs (1993), undoubtedly the better of the two films she made about her home town, Kristinehamn, during her last years in the U.S. (the other film from the same year is called simply Kristine's Harbor), she crafts a condensed meditation on place, both familiar and foreign, preserved in memory yet unrecognizably changed.Many of Nelson's other films also deal with places, for example Light Years (1987) and Light Years Expanding (1988), which both portray the Swedish countryside from south to north, in images that quickly pass by through views from a car window moving hastily through the landscape. On the soundtrack there are snippets from the ocean weather report, children's voices happily singing "The spring is chirping, glittering," or simply motor sounds. There are flashes of life, of landscape, a liberating openness in what appears to be an aimless journey-but it wouldn't be Nelson if a pictorial meditation about decay and mortality were not also included: a rotting apple (a repeating motif in many of her films), a crushed fruit worm. Such seemingly unimportant details serve as vanity emblems and contribute a streak of seriousness to the work.
Hardest to describe are the later, most clearly experimental films. In Field Study #2 (1988) or Natural Features (1990) Nelson includes painting, collage, and sketches, and she also paints over the images on the film screen (without her hands ever appearing in the image-we see only a disembodied brush, rendering an "organic" transformation of the work as such). Or consider how, in the short video pieces Trdgrns/Tree Line (1998) and Snowdrift (a.k.a. Snowstorm, 2001), Nelson moves even further toward abstraction. In Trdgrns this happens when a video of a rushing train is combined with a still life of a tree with many branches silhouetted against the sky, offering an unmoving, stable background to the foreground's constant shifts. Snowdrift begins and ends with the image of whirling snowflakes against a red wall. Another wall is also present, and a window with the sculpture of a moose in silhouette. Through variations of tempo and of background throughout the film, the snowflakes and the wall's boards experience differing connections: horizontal, vertical, diagonal, rotating at differing speeds, nearing each other or separating, breaking up and quivering/flickering, with dissonant sounds or silence as the accompanying elements on the soundtrack. Fred Andersson, doctoral candidate at Lund University, writes in conclusion in Still Moving that the video shows "Gunvor Nelson's complex approach to shaping and manipulating her visual material and allowing the properties of the media to become visible. In the short passages of the video where the white moose appears accompanied by a strange, wordless song, she again shows us how she empowers certain motifs with a strong poetic significance, however indefinite-like a sound that only reminds us of a word."6 Once again Nelson succeeds in eliciting from a highly concrete picture-this time of falling snowflakes-manifold significations which at the same time remain secretive. Hers is a condensed poetry of images.
Throughout these shifting images certain repeating elements can be found. The occurrence of water is one of the images that remains with the viewer in many films, beginning with the relatively early Moon's Pool (1973). Of this film, Nelson herself says, "I wanted it to be like diving into water, not knowing what you would find."7For me this has, in hindsight, come to be a key response, one which encapsulates Nelson's approach. There's a diving deep into the unexpected, a venturing into the unknown-against the grain of the film medium, where practitioners otherwise almost always choose to draw on established conventions. Nelson's work thereby draws the viewer with it into a tempestuous, fascinating whirl of living images.
Notes
1 This essay, titled "Ett kabinett fr vardagens visuella under," was first published in the newspaper, Svenska Dagbladet, 28 August 2002, 9. The English translation is by Chris Holmlund.
2 Steve Anker, "The Films of Gunvor Nelson," in John Sundholm, ed., Gunvor Nelson, Still Moving-I ljud och bild, (Karlstad: Karlstad University, 2002), 11.
3 Anders Pettersson, "Interview," in Sundholm, ed., Gunvor Nelson, Still Moving-I ljud och bild, 38.
4 Ibid., 38.
5 Steve Anker, "The Films of Gunvor Nelson," in Sundholm, ed., 18.
6 Fred Andersson, "Technology and Poetry," in Sundholm, ed., 98.
7 Anders Pettersson "Interview," in Sundholm, ed., 34.
Astrid Soderbergh Widding is Professor of Cinema Studies at Stockholm University and Chair of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation. She has published extensively on European art cinema and on film and aesthetics.
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