The Material and the Mimetic: On Gunvor Nelson's Personal Filmmaking

by John Sundholm

Experimental or avant-garde film is a tricky notion. In North America, "avant-garde" is the more common term of the two because film as a practice is primarily marked by a manifestly commercial culture. Non-profit, minor, and inexpensively produced film is itself a phenomenon of the avant-garde in a climate that is strictly capitalist.1 In Europe, where hardly any feature films aimed for regular distribution are produced without public funding (that is, partly non-commercial), the oppositions between different economies of production are not as polarized.

I am, however, convinced that we have these imprecise and restricting notions of avant-garde or experimental because film as a field of study has such a short history. The emerging digital culture of the moving image that is blending formats, media and practices of exhibition will soon make the notion of "film" obsolete. Nonetheless, the dominant form, i.e., narrative feature film, has become-and has been-the metonymical figure for film as an economy (movies), social form (film) and aesthetic language (cinema). What the recent changes in formats, media, and exhibition will imply for those products and practices that David James has termed "minor cinemas"2 is that, when taken together, "minor" cinematic forms will turn out to be "major" in terms of output and availability, due to digital technology and the Internet. The change is nevertheless not radically new. In 1958, Pontus Hultn, the up-and-coming, versatile director of Stockholm's Museum of Contemporary Art (one of the leading European art museums of the 1960s), pointed this out in a catalogue for Viking Eggeling's work:

In a couple of years probably no one will talk about film as they are doing now. The concept of film will disappear. Film will be used in the same way as the printed word. The simple fact that the moving image is projected by an opticmechanical apparatus will be no more of a common denominator than that all printed letters are printed in a printing press. There will be as many kinds of film as there are novels, newspapers, brochures, secret reports, essays and poems. And every kind will be considered as something separate in itself.3

According to Holly Willis in New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image (2005), we have finally reached what Hultn predicted. Willis describes the current state of things as:

. . . a resurgence of interest in large-scale film and video installations in galleries and museums as film and video converge; an increasing use of live video sampling tools in club events; a renewed independent film movement featuring narrative experimentation, low-budget modes of production and, on occasion, a focus on overtly personal or political issues; a reinvestigation of the goals and projects of the classical avant-garde; the advent of 'digital graffiti'; and a growing media-based culture not beholden to the constraints either of the narrative form, nor even of the movie theatre.4

I have called the new situation (in another context) "the non-place of cinema," stressing the way film as a concept has changed, merging with an expansive and hybrid moving image culture.5 However, let me emphasize again that the current state is not really new. Hultn envisioned the change because of his experiences in the kinetic art scene in 1950s Paris. Tom Gunning, who has promoted the concept of "a cinema of attractions," has suggested that film was, from the beginning, a hybrid and heterogeneous form;6 and Willis carefully points out that what we are experiencing is a "reinvention." Peter Weibel, on the other hand, has stressed how the lack of knowledge of the history of experimental film among art critics has led them to "exaggerate contemporary achievements" in what is called video art today.7

Covering some forty years of this long transition in both media use and technological equipment, Gunvor Nelson's work is another test case for questions about this change. It so challenges cinema studies that it prompts us to ask how to categorize, label or describe such films. Nelson's production is not so unconventional that it is beyond any boundaries, but her integrity has confronted established structures and her work has often been displaced to the periphery as a result. Surprisingly, she is not that well known inside the smallish culture of the American avant-garde film tradition. This is peculiar since, as Michael Zryd states, the avant-garde/experimental film culture in North America regularly recycles the films and filmmakers of the '60s and '70s,8 turning this cinema into an institution with a distinct canon and teleological history. Although gender prejudice and Nelson's own policy regarding exhibition (film is film and should therefore be projected in proper theaters) are part of the explanation of the ignorance of her work, this is not enough to easily explain her occlusion.

Four areas of Nelson's work should be considered. Two are related to inherent characteristics affecting experimental film culture-gender and distribution/ exhibition. Two others-authorial formalism and an overly simplified historiography-concern academic practices regarding the moving image. They may be considered as reasons for the neglect of Nelson's work. Thus, one of the key qualities that her work foregrounds is the way her films and videos bring these insufficiencies forward.The first is the question of authority, or "auteurism," and how Nelson's approach may be said to transform that category. It is a prime link between gender and authorship. In an interview, Nelson's own comments are illuminating:

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 painter for instance and so on. But when it comes to film we lack [the capacity] to describe what we are really doing.9

Of course, Nelson's oeuvre has a few generalized characteristics. Such films as Schmeerguntz (US, 1966) and Fog Pumas (US, 1967), both co-made with Dorothy Wiley, are clearly part of the tradition of underground filmmaking. Schmeerguntz is a hilarious critique of the officially sanctioned image of the American woman and housewife, which provoked critic Ernest Callenbach to write that the film "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 shown everywhere-in every PTA, every Rotary Club, every garden club in the land."10 Fog Pumas, in turn, is an ironic, satirical commentary on the conventions of experimental filmmaking (and especially that of Surrealism). In another category are the films specifically about Nelson's family. My Name is Oona (US, 1969) is the most famous one. Two more-Red Shift (US, 1984) and Time Being (US, 1991)-complete an astonishing trilogy of generations. I have difficulty finding another example from film history where different stages in life, of being a child, mother and grandmother, or that of birth, maturity and death, are depicted in such uncompromising detail.

Finally, the partly animated collage films can be grouped together: Frame Line (US, 1983), Light Years (US, 1987) and Field Study #2 (US, 1988); works that are, according to Steve Anker, outstanding in the experimental field but extremely difficult for the occasional viewer.11 The exclusivity of the collage films lies in the modernistic method used: the films are constructed of imagery through which Nelson employs the full moving image language: mixing animation, documentary footage, photography, painting and sound and, in so doing, creating a new amalgam of expression. Despite their radical nature, these films have common cinematic traits: a constantly moving camera, a rhythm directed by editing and a metonymical use of the single frame or picture. This is a complete aesthetics of the moving image where all cinematic means are used, an aesthetics that Nelson continued to use when she moved to a new format-video-with the making of Tree-Line in 1998. Only Snowdrift (US, 2001) shows characteristics of conventional video art where, as Gene Youngblood describes it, "the image as object" is constituted.12 But here, too, Nelson's work expands the art: Snowdrift demonstrates ways that video may permit a greater elaboration of aesthetics and mood through sound. This is another salient trait: her use of sound. Nelson has always been a distinguished sound artist but digital production has enabled her to have even more control (and more time) to work with the soundscape.

Nelson's production is also characterized by a depiction of women's experiences and of what it means to be a woman. Her renditions are revealing, sensual, erotic, critical and realistic but never overt, didactic or simplistic. The beginning of this strand is feminist in a very direct sense. The harsh critique of a 1960s ideal of femininity offered in Schmeerguntz later transforms into sensitive, moving images of woman as miracle (the birth film Kirsa Nicholina, US, 1969), as object (Take Off, US, 1972), and as existential being (Moons Pool, US, 1973).

But there is a more profound aesthetics. Nelson's attitude brings an old idea to the fore: that of the mimetic. By this I mean mimesis not in accordance with the unproductive, tiresome juxtaposition of content versus form but as that which can never be conceptualized or clearly articulated. Yet it can be captured (especially in an audiovisual medium like film) and is therefore not beyond articulation. Such a view of the mimetic constitutes what I call an ethics of materiality, a respect for the object and for the aesthetic material employed, and for the material and the things that surround us. This mimetic attitude is very close to the notion of mimesis for which Adorno argued in his Aesthetic Theory (1970). While Adorno is difficult to quote, I refer to a summary by Hauke Brunkhorst, which aptly points to Adorno's core arguments:

[Mimesis] means an attitude to one's natural and social environment and to other people and other things that does not compel this otherness to be under one's own will. Mimesis in the sense Adorno is using the word here means to do 'justice' to the otherness of the other, and to react adequately to the latter's own aptitudes and concerns. 'False projection' conversely means the projection of an image that does not fit with the otherness of the other, one's own egocentric image of the world. False projection makes everything its own image.13

The American experimental film canon is basically male territory; its artists and interpreters are mostly men. Of course, it is no coincidence that the avant-garde mode of film production, the artisanal and authorial, coheres well with the stereotypic male ideal of extroversion and control-of personal domination. Nelson, who is well known for her uncompromising attitude toward screening conditions and print quality, does not, on the other hand, dominate and control what she is filming. In short, she doesn't impose a vision or a worldview on someone or on an object. Nor does Nelson make films that carry imprints of a single authorial voice. She does not create a "Nelson style." What characterizes her work is the absence of all such false projections, something distinctively obvious in Kirsa Nicholina and Take Off. The former is a straightforward film of a home birth, an event that Nelson found so overwhelming that she could do nothing but record what was happening (Nelson had never planned to shoot the film; someone else was supposed to make it). She even chose to keep a flaw in the lightning caused by the lab. And in a film like Take Off, where Nelson uses animation techniques to deconstruct the (presumed male) image of a woman's body, there is a tenderness and esteem for the body "object." The rather plump and aged stripper is given full respect for her performance and professionalism. Nelson articulates this openness and consideration in a rare written piece about filmmaking. In a handout for an editing class, she states:

However, surprising solutions can be had with the most "deficient" of material if you let it speak to you; if you learn what really is in the film. Patiently, you should familiarize yourself with every frame, overlooking no flaw or detail. At this stage it is essential to look for what is actually there-as opposed to the preconceived, romantic idea of what you would like it to be.14

Nelson is one of those exceptional filmmakers whose aim is not to judge or belittle, although some of her works are clearly political, for example, Schmeerguntz and Take Off regarding images of women; Frame Line on Sweden, Stockholm and Swedishness; and Red Shift on the politics of family relationships, especially that between a mother and daughter. Likewise, the thoughtfulness that characterizes Nelson's work is content-oriented. My Name is Oona, a film which is strikingly beautiful in its depiction of a child's world where fantasy and reality merge in the same phenomenological space, has a grim side as well-Nelson also focuses on what is frightening to a child. This discordance extends to the soundtrack: the repetitious sound that starts as a way of discovering the joy of rhythm and resonance, of ordinary music, develops into expressions of the authoritarian function of language. Nelson includes the sound of her daughter Oona's efforts to learn the order of the days of the week, guided by adults. In Red Shift, on the other hand-a film that is something of a tribute to Nelson's family and to family life in general-the repetitive and common conflicts that are part of everyday family life and that can hardly ever be solved are given extensive time and space. The film features Nelson's own family and Nelson's "playing" out of different roles that represent a family: mother, daughter, grandmother, father and grandfather. The film merges two diegetic times. It is staged both in a present and in a past, a fact only shown by the opening titles. Conflicts and contradictions are truthful. Clashes are portrayed for what they are. At the same time, Nelson invites the viewer to experience them in their amalgamation of beauty, distress and complexity.

Nelson's resolute attitude toward projection and exhibition is one of the standard anecdotes in the experimental/avant-garde film world. This also has to do with her relation to the authorial question. Her films are personal in that they stem from her. She knows exactly how they should look and sound. Hence, when it comes to copying and printing, a film is not sent anonymously to a lab. Each copy is the result of an individual lab process. It is a unique object with its own individual relation to the negative. Film is primarily a very fragile, singular and, hence, aural medium for Nelson; thus her work brilliantly counters Walter Benjamin's thesis that film as a medium is without an origin, hence lacking an aura and open to endless reproduction.

Her attitude makes sense when one watches her films attentively in a good theater. Nelson's particularity even makes the projector part of the event. It is very difficult to imagine how the soft blueness and glittering contrasts in Moons Pool could be transferred into another format or what the experience would be like if the graininess and luster of Red Shift were faded due to poor projection. The movements between a black, dark screen and glimpses of light and color that are so characteristic of many of Nelson's works-ranging from Fog Pumas to Tree-Line-demand projection where the only available light is from the projector, immersing the viewer in a dark, transcendent space.

Despite these authorial imprints and interventions, Nelson is not an author in the sense that she is creating a coherent body of films that could be summed up as belonging to one homogenous style. It would be a misleading shortcut to interpret Nelson's as an all-inclusive force reducible to "essence." She is far too considerate and explorative a filmmaker to be caught in any preconceived idea. This approach is one of the great qualities in her work: a truthfulness that never leads to a false projection. Nelson's object is never deprived of its enigmatic character or given a simple identity or meaning. Consequently, I am not surprised that one of Nelson's latest works is called True to Life (2006). Even the highly constructed collage films like Frame Line, Light Years and Field Study #2 show a love for raw material: objects, landscapes, lines and colors. For example, we see a brush in action, but the hand is omitted in order to focus on the material processing of the image and not on the person behind it.

The so-called realistic or documentary stance and culture of the moving image has been much criticized during the last decades, not least because the rise of new digital media has blown away the innocence of indexical ideology. However, one of the great values in film as a medium is that it enables the filmmaker to speak through the material, upholding the things, sounds and movements which already surround us.15 The material value of film was something that Siegfried Kracauer already drew attention to in his plea for an aesthetic of realism in Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960). For Kracauer, the nature of the medium was revealed in the direct and sensual depictions of "railway noises" in Brief Encounter (David Lean, UK, 1945) or the streets in Umberto D (Vittorio De Sica, IT, 1952) that led "a life of their own."16 Very often this has been interpreted as nave realism, as a call for an aesthetic of the image, of seeing through the image out into the world. But Kracauer's remark may also be viewed as a plea for a materialistic sensuality; the railway noises and the street are, in his examples, beyond representation and narrative, beyond sign and signified, and constitute therefore a pure sensual and material experience. One of the original potentials in film (and the moving image) is that the medium allowed one to experience the world in all its material freshness. This is particularly true of Nelson's work, as every film and video by her is based on a genuinely new experience of the material world, not only of the objects as such but also of the feelings, temper and qualities that the surroundings embody. Hence, the importance of Nelson's production in the current culture is the way that she uses a medium that still has the capacity to preserve otherness. She creates highly personal films that draw attention to our surroundings without imposing her subjectivity or will on either viewer or object. This aesthetics of particularity, of a respect for the momentary, is a challenge to any academic practice. It challenges historiography of experimental film as well, forcing the scholarship of minor cinemas to create heterogeneous "minor histories."

A history of experimental film lends itself to what Michel Foucault has called "general history." In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Foucault makes a distinction between "total" and "general history." The former reduces everything (all phenomena) to a central core whereas general history "deploy[s] the space of a dispersion."17 Thus, an appropriate historiography- a general history-must include all components: producers, products, practices, conceptions and conduct. It should not reduce those relations. We should not have an "experimental film" or "the Gunvor Nelson film;" rather, we should take in the relations, connections and interplay wherein this work resides. Therefore it is worth bearing in mind Michel de Certeau's words regarding history (although my point here concerns all meaning-making practices): "History thus vacillates between two poles. On the one hand it refers to a practice, hence to a reality; on the other, it is a closed discourse, a text that organizes and concludes a mode of intelligibility."18 Thus, if to study Gunvor Nelson's production it has to be closed and reorganized according to a logic of signs and signifiers, then its most vital characteristic must be in its ethics of otherness.

Notes
1 Paul Arthur: "a mesh of semi-stable funding sources, fixed channels of distribution and exhibition, and organs of publicity, along with material exigencies (e.g. budgetary and technological considerations) and shared elements of production (e.g., subfeature length, unscripted, made by single individuals or two-person collaborations, predominantly in 16 mm non-sync sound, and so on)." Paul Arthur, "'I Just Pass my Hands over the Surface of Things': On and Off Screen, Circa 2003," in John Sundholm, ed., Gunvor Nelson and the Avant-Garde (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003), 75-76.
2 David James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
3 Pontus Hultn, "Inledning," Aprop Eggeling (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1958), 7 (my translation). The Eggeling exhibition consisted mainly of a series of film screenings that actually constituted the grand opening of the museum. Hultn later had plans to let Peter Kubelka curate and establish a film collection at the museum. The task was realized for Centres Pompidou in Paris when Hultn became its director.
4 Holly Willis, New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), 3-4.
5 John Sundholm, "Contemporary Cinematic Work from Finland: The Non-Place of Cinema and Identity," in New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 4, no. 2 (2006): 83-92.
6 Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde," in Thomas Elsaesser, ed., Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: BFI, 1990).
7 Peter Weibel, "Expanded Cinema, Video and Virtual Environments," in Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel, eds., Future Cinema: the Cinematic Imaginary after Film (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press), 120.
8 Michael Zryd: "The Academy and the Avant-Garde: A Relationship of Dependence and Resistance", Cinema Journal 45 no. 2 (2006): 17-42.
9 Interview by Anders Pettersson published in Gunvor Nelson and the Avant-Garde, ed. Sundholm, 147.
10 Quoted by Steve Anker, "The Films of Gunvor Nelson," in Still Moving: I Ljud ochbild, ed. John Sundholm (Karlstad: Karlstad University Press, 2002), 11. Callenbach's review was originally published in Film Quarterly no. 1 (1971).
11 Anker, 18-22.
12 Gene Youngblood, "Cinema and the Code," in Shaw and Weibel, eds., Future Cinema, 157. Originally published in a supplemental issue of Leonardo, Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1989).
13 Hauke Brunkhorst, Adorno and Critical Theory (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), 62.
14 Gunvor Nelson, handout for editing class.
15 This stance does not oppose the so-called structuralist film tradition. While this tradition (at least in the UK) aimed not to attack "realism" per se, it opposed the dominant film culture's attempt to transcend the image, to make a disappearance of the means so that the world would appear. The means were understood to be the material in a broad sense-film stock, format, the apparatus, exhibition practices and so on-but also the material and aesthetic qualities of the image. This version of structuralism is very evident in Malcolm Le Grice's early works (Little Dog for Roger, UK, 1967; Yes No Maybe Maybe Not, UK, 1967; Berlin Horse, UK, 1970), which largely consist of found footage, a genre that through re-use points to the material in a twofold way. It draws aesthetic attention to both the object depicted and the means of recording it. Even such a hardcore structuralist film as Peter Gidal's Room Film 1973 (UK, 1973) plays on this twofold relation: being both a deconstruction of narrative film/representation and an experience of color, duration and composition. Thus, Nicky Hamlyn is right to make a distinction between Stan Brakhage's transformative aesthetics and those of Gidal, when he claims that "Gidal accepts that other things are going on in his films apart from what he is attempting to control." (Nicky Hamlyn, Film Art Phenomena [London: BFI, 2003], 95). Hence, when the structuralists acknowledged an expanded conception of the material, they also partly acknowledged an embracing of film's realist quality.
16 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969; rpt London: Routledge, 1989), 10. The best description of such a general history is Mitchell Dean's: "such a history seeks series, divisions, differences of temporality and level, form of continuity and mutation, particular types of transition events, possible relations and so on. [ . . . ] [O]ne which specifies its own terrain, the series it constitutes, and the relations between them." Mitchell Dean, Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault's Methods and Historical Sociology (Routledge: London 1994), 93-94.
17 Michel De Certeau, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 21.
John Sundholm is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Karlstad University and Reader in Cultural Analysis at bo Akademi University, Finland. He is director of the research project "The History of Swedish Experimental Film" (2006-2008) and has published work in English on experimental cinema in journals such as Studies in European Cinema (Bristol: Intellect) and New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film (Intellect).
Recent books: editor of Gunvor Nelson and the Avant-Garde (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003); co-editor of Memory Work (Peter Lang, 2005); co-editor of Collective Traumas: Memories of War and Conflict in 20th- Century Europe (Brussels: PIE-Peter Lang, 2007). A version of "The Material and the Mimetic: on Gunvor Nelson's Personal Filmmaking" appeared in Evidence, the catalogue for Gunvor Nelson's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2006.