The personal poetics of Gunvor Nelson

Lynn Sachs

It’s taken me seventeen years to realize what an inspiration Gunvor Nelson is for me as a filmmaker, a teacher and a mother who allowed her work as an artist to grow and change as a result of her decision to become a parent.  Aspects of the life she led in the Bay Area during the mid-to-late 1980’s resonate for me often, and in many surprising ways.  I remember the exasperation I felt as one of her graduate students at the San Francisco Art Institute.  In my opinion, my final 16mm film was taking far too long to complete.  Gunvor sat with me at the Steenbeck editing table and emphatically explained that I would soon be longing for the feeling of being thoroughly and passionately inside my work.  When the film was done, I would miss the joy of that private world, the sensation of being consumed by the creative process.

Well before I  had my own two daughters, I watched Gunvor’s marvelous cinematic meditations on childhood, pregnancy and family.  From “Schmeerguntz” to “My Name is Oona” to “Red Shift” to “Time Being”, Gunvor looked at the relationship between mothers and daughters with an unflinching eye.  I watched these movies in my mid-twenties with rapture.  The result was a seismic shift in my sense of possibility – both personally and artistically.  When Gunvor took out her Bolex camera, the strangest, most intriguing transformations would happen on the screen.  Green apples would devour themselves with unfathomable delicacy.  Snowstorms would purr like a prowling cat.  Unlike so many filmmakers I knew in the Bay Area who had chosen the ease and excitement of the city, Gunvor lived in an isolated, windswept house perched above the Pacific Ocean.  As I continue my life as a filmmaker in Brooklyn, New York, I sometimes think about the occasional, early morning walks the two of us took across the verdant hills of the Marin Headlands. After twenty years in the Bay Area, Gunvor Nelson returned to Sweden, where she continues to produce moving image pieces. 

by Lynn Sachs

Gunvor Nelson, Bob Nelson and Oona Nelson

Gunvor Nelson returns to the Bay Area after leaving her California home in Muir Beach in 1992 to return to her native Sweden. She lived in the Bay Area for over thirty years and for twenty of those she taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. Gunvor came to Northern California to study art and received an MFA degree in Painting and Art History from Mills College in Oakland. With her first film, Schmeerguntz, made with Dorothy Wiley, she began her prolific artistic career as a filmmaker, completing 26 works from 1966 through this year. Coinciding with the move to Sweden was her move from working with film to video, which has enabled her to explore the more direct editing process and to return to abstract forms of expression.

In many of her major works she addresses subjects such as: childhood, memory, the idea of home/homeland and displacement, aging and death, and the symbolism of natural forces — particularly in relation to female beauty and power. Her talents for editing what is often dreamlike imagery, combined with fine attention to the effects of language and sound on the moving image, serve to enhance the consistent aesthetic of her experimental films.

Nelson often creates what she termed “personal films” rather than “experimental” or “avant-garde” films; on this matter she says:

"Everyone seemed unsure of what to call it. It is difficult. Are you really so "avant-garde"? Experimental films sounds like something incomplete. I have made both surrealistic and expressionistic films, but I prefer the term "personal film". That is what it is about. Even if many don't understand the meaning of the term. On the other hand, it can be easier to refer to them as avant-garde films. But I like the description "personal film" since it stems from one person. When you paint, the term you choose will be described by method; mural painters for instance and so on. But when it comes to film we lack [the capacity] to describe what we are really doing." (Sundholm, 167).

Her depictions of women's experiences and issues of identity are never overtly political in their agenda or simplistic in nature; often they explore the sensual and erotic, and critique society's portrayal of women (Sundholm, 4) yet she denies any specifically "feminist" agenda behind her art-making. Instead, she creates "feminist" works in the broader sense of the term, they seek to find a more universal resonance as they address the personal and: "what is original, instinctive, and natural in womankind".Nelson also prefers not to be referred to as a "woman" artist but simply an "artist".

Nelson's work often reveals her fascination with the visual translation and transformation of the world that a camera is capable of achieving. Commenting on her first film Schmeerguntz, a collaborative effort with Dorothy Wiley Nelson said:

"I discovered how beautiful things look through the camera... A melon or dirty dishes, seen with a lens in close-up were translated into something else... The camera became like binoculars; you zero in on a small area and isolate it, and it becomes more precious because it's selected." (Holmlund, 78).

Her fascination with materials reflected in the titling of her work likely stems from her earlier artistic background as a painter. The visual transformations she obtains in the act of filming she typically modifies through painting and animation, and then organizes through painstaking editing of images and sound.

“I am afraid of becoming “too skillful”. Then you lose some of the expression, I think. If you repeat a gesture too many times it easily becomes a routine, but it is also hard not to use the skills and knowledge you have acquired. Then you risk losing that which is unique and that which you have not done before. Concerning video I already have the image, I do not need to relearn how to compose or assemble it...I can produce it all by myself.” (Gunvor Nelson, from Still Moving)                                                                                                                                              

Gunvor Nelson films and videos are a rare opportunity to experience the accumulated impact of Nelson's artistic vision. Her poetically expansive life's work-created in both San Francisco, her home and workplace for over thirty years, and her native Sweden, where she has resettled-has consistently, often courageously, privileged her subjective gaze and individual experience. Nelson relentlessly refuses predictability (and succeeds) in her search for a true relation between project and form. Among the most experimental of artists, Nelson illuminates such elusive and intimate subjects as childhood, aging, displacement, memory, women's roles, death, and the symbolic forces of nature and water via a potent exploration of the possibilities of sound and moving image. Her ephemeral, dreamlike images are simultaneously tactile and almost tangible, while her imaginative use of language and traces of music add considerably to the emotional impact of her works. Filmic collage and dynamic editing create tension and contrast. The unique characteristics of Nelson's works form less a definable style than a sustained aesthetic.