Signature and Translation in Gunvor Nelson's Films

by Chris Holmlund     

In the male-dominated contexts of 1960s avant-garde film, filmmakers Bruce Baillie, Bruce Conner and Stan Brakhage were among those foremost in the West Coast "eye." It was perhaps inevitable, therefore, that Swedish artist Gunvor Nelson, who had lived in the Bay Area from the mid 1960s, and collaborator Dorothy Wiley should initially be received as feminist filmmakers, especially since their first collage film, Schmeerguntz (US, 1965), wittily contrasts 1940s-1960s mass media constructs of what femininity "should" be (via clips and collages taken from the Miss America pageant, television fitness shows and magazine advertisements) with Wiley's daily routines while pregnant with a second child (we see her, for example, cleaning gunk from a sink, struggling to put on garter belt, stockings and boots).1 Yet the film does not focus exclusively on women, though both Nelson and Wiley's experiences as young mothers helped shape it. (Nelson appears fleetingly with her young daughter Oona near the end.) Nelson herself has always eschewed the label "feminist," maintaining that in the case of Schmeerguntz she was simply working with what she had at hand.2 Indeed, as will be clear, her work is "impossible to categorize either in gender or geographical terms."3 The films, all shot on 16mm, are strikingly different, but certain themes, attitudes and approaches modulate across them, and carry over, if in altered fashion, to the videos as well.

In Nelson's case, signature and translation acquire specific tonalities. Her films are intensely personal and at the same time abstract; many are surrealist; several include family members and/or Nelson herself; many incorporate animation and painting. All are carefully, if often barely perceptibly, structured around contrasts of color, rhythm, light, line, form and texture. That six of the twenty-four works that Nelson has "authored" are actually "co-authored" is thus not a problem to establishing "signature" in the sense either of authorship or of characteristic elements.4 Nelson's measured shaping of sounds and placement of silence provide, moreover, a third sense of "signature," one reminiscent of "time signature" and "key signature" in music. Equally important are Nelson's multiple engagements with translation. Among the several definitions listed in Webster's Dictionary that I find suggestive are: (as noun) "1a: a rendering from one language into another" and "1b: a change to a different substance, form, or appearance: conversion"; (as verb) "1Vista previaa: to bear, remove, or change from one place, state, form or appearance to another. . . ," "2a: to turn into one's own or another language," "2b: to transfer or turn from one set of symbols into another," and "3: to enrapture."5 She engages all of these in her films.

Silencing Sounds/Sounding Silences

Many diverse modalities of signature and translation-and a crucial "resonance"- flow through Nelson's work, for in all her films and videos emotion and mood predominate, fueling, prompting and soliciting our reflections, ruminations and interactions. These are shaped through an unmooring of language and a probing of "signature" in the more musical sense, via a stress on aural textures, rhythms and voicing. Equally, her surrealist play with words, generic expectations and film conventions mirrors these stresses, as does her focus on silence.

Attention to the "silence" of sounds and the "sound" of silences shades all of Nelson's work. Already in Schmeerguntz, Nelson and Wiley devoted much care to editing the sound track. There, the rapid images find their equivalents in the staccato splicing of songs and snippets of recorded conversation and voice-over narration; there are no fades in or out. The visual/audial combinations are often ironic: a polka accompanies a photographic collage of priests dancing in circles in the snow; a male voice says, "And he kissed her again," as vomit pours (in reverse motion) back into a woman's mouth; "I Could Have Danced All Night" accompanies shots of a toilet being cleaned.

My Name Is Oona (US, 1969) explores memory, imagination, travel and translation. Again, sounds are key. Nelson's seven-year-old daughter, Oona, appears on horseback and/or costumed in a cape, blonde hair flying as she rides "as if" a John Bauer fairy tale princess; in closing, perhaps intermingling her own childhood fantasies with her daughter's, Nelson softly sings snatches of a Swedish folk song. No translation is offered. Nelson's untranslated song then suggests quiet closure to a film organized around two types of recordings. The first is of her young daughter repeating, mantra-like, "My Name Is Oona," in many looped versions. The second (recorded by Steve Reich) is formed by Oona's recitation of the days of the week. Volume and tempo accelerate and decelerate; solo utterances are interwoven with "choral" ones. Words become differently "meaningful," even mystical, as what's melodic and rhythmic about language moves forward. Haunting images-of Oona on her horse in the woods, in the fields, wrestling with a friend, smiling in closeup- are rendered in a variety of ways. In the beginning, trees are seen in positive and negative images. Other scenes are re-photographed in close up so that the grain is visible; a few are slowed down.6 Always, they move "with" the sound track.

In her later work, Nelson shies away from straightforward sound-image associations, opting instead for more musical "signatures."7 She refuses to include her two-hour-long family meditation, Trollstenen (US, 1973-76) in retrospectives, in part because it incorporates translated interviews, in part because she finds the film too long. Yet in every film, albeit in some more than others, key and meter, placement and pitch, rhythm and dynamics, variation and theme, color what we see. As in the polyvalent structures of Bach's fugues, sound tracks form other "lines," other "voices," that attend to and peel off from the images. In many films, there are bursts of synthesized music, bars played on actual instruments or screeches, shouts, bits of song, whistles and bells. Natural Features (US, 1990), for example, incorporates the sound of a car radio searching for stations, scraps of music, the singing of the film title, and stretches of silence; on the visual plane, cut-outs, photos, mirrors, toys, puzzle pieces, ink and paint flash past in waves of color and shards of shapes. Nelson is intrigued by the impact pacing has, commenting:

If you would use two strong sounds after each other, the second sound would diminish or drown the first one. . . . A sound reverberates in your brain long after it has subsided if no other sound has followed. . . . It is being repeated in you. . . . I like the idea of being able to prolong a sound in this manner.

In Kristina's Harbor (US, 1993) and especially in Old Digs (US, 1993), sounds break away from images while silences interrupt and pace sounds. Shot at the same time, on a return to Sweden in 1990, Nelson typically distinguishes the two via their image tracks. Kristina's Harbor, she says, represents what she found above water around her hometown, Kristinehamn, whereas Old Digs represents what she found below and associated with the "unconscious." Many of the visuals in the latter are reflections-of trees, buildings, people-in water. Yet the sound tracks are equally distinctive. In Kristina's Harbor snatches of voices speaking in (V�rml�ndsk) dialects talk about what it's like to live in Kristinehamn. Sometimes they mention why they've chosen to stay there and occasionally (though not often) their commentary is translated to English. A few titles are also given in English: almost immediately "I am so in love with my little town" appears; soon after, a young man says the same thing, in Swedish. In Old Digs, in contrast, though images of actual excavation again appear, Nelson's archaeological explorations have moved deeper. Words recede into a background buzz of indecipherable murmuring and mumbling. Other aural elements-clock tones, a rainstorm-come and go, bereft of readily identifiable visual anchors.9

Nelson's interest in voicing extends to a respect for silence qua silence. The eight-minute-long, black-and-white Time Being (US, 1991), made when her mother, Carin Grundel, was ninety years old (she died not long after), audaciously refuses sound and thereby becomes, I feel, her most powerful film. There are three principle sections, each punctuated by gestural camera work. A prelude offers two photos of Nelson's mother. In one, she stands upright and energetic on skis in long shot; in the other, she smiles at the camera/photographer in close-up. Briefly, one of the photos "shakes." In stark contrast, the first and longest section contains no camera movement or editing. Instead, we see Carin Grundel in close-up, lying prone on a nursing home or hospital bed, face partially averted from the camera, her mouth sunken, struggling to breathe. Though her eyes flicker open from time to time, she seems not to realize that anyone else is in the room. Suddenly, an interlude: the camera pans wildly around the room, there are a few edits, then all fades to black. The second section, again a fixed long take but now a medium shot, shows Carin lying immobile in the same position. After another brief interlude, the camera moves back further still, gazing steadily in fixed long shot at Carin's body in bed, revealing tree branches outside the window, flowers on the sill, an empty bed to one side. For a moment the sun comes out then goes away, the light changes to near white, "creating," for Nelson, "a widening of space, a holy moment."10 Finally, the camera pans slowly to the floor, showing, as the last image, the sandaled feet of Nelson herself.

By film's end silence has become unbelievably expressive-underscoring time, suggesting being. Cognizant of the impact that these alternations between fixed and frenzied movements, duration and silence, have, Nelson makes no stills from the film available.11 As she says:

When you see a film without sound, you're forced to confront your own thoughts and your own fears. Without sound one can hear one's own voice more clearly and from that find distance and room to look for the personal meaning the film may have. . . . The question of balance, lack of balance, is something that's very important to me. . . . If everything has the same value, nothing is underlined or emphasized. I am very careful about trying to find the right scale of color and emphasis.12

Nelson's balancing-and unbalancing-of sound and silence, movement and image, clearly moves space and time into dimensions other than those inhabited by mainstream feature-length film. Deleuze's insights in Le Temps-Image also apply to Nelson's projects of layering and excavation:

When the acoustic is no longer an extension of the visual, the acoustic and the visual become two distinct layers of a 'stratigraphic' space. . . . [T]he visual image never reproduces what the voice utters, and the sound track never describes what the image shows. However, even if the two domains are incommensurable, they are not without relation. There is in fact a complementarity between sound and image based on their strategic dissociation. . . . The relation between sound and image requires a rotation of visible surfaces or an excavation of pictured landscapes. . .13

The Need For Multiple Meanings

Nelson's burying and unearthing of meanings, messages, forms and relations is profoundly marked by surrealism.14 Like the Surrealists, Nelson is fond of dreamlike and/or punning visuals: most obviously in Fog Pumas (US, 1967), Before Need (US, 1979) and Before Need Redressed (US, 1995). Speaking to students of mine at the University of Stockholm, Nelson said she tried in the latter two films to capture "the beauty of our strange obsessions." (The title, "before need," alludes to a sign in a chapel that advertises cubicles for funeral urns.) Like the Surrealists, too, Nelson delights in nonsensical, if allusive, intertitles. In Natural Features, several-all in block letter type-are interspersed among the images. Some-e.g., "RECENT EXCAVATIONS," "PLEASE EXCAVATE," "SUNKEN TERRAIN," "EXCAVATION IN PROGRESS"-implicate spatial strata; two-"IN PLAIN VIEW" and (the last) "POSSIBLE SOURCE OF ERROR"-suggest, then question, knowledge. The earlier Frame Line (US, 1984) also plays with intertitles, among them are "gedigna visioner (reluctantly leaving behind),"15 "all remote, random," "and in harmony," "sightseeing," "greetings from," and "lingering notes." For me, these hint at a foreigner's/ exile's sensitivity to shifting meanings and varying contexts, at the difficulty of speaking in a language not one's own, in a language one's been away from. One might similarly regard the strange sayings of "Lout Sue Sez" (a joke about Lao Tze, the Chinese philosopher) which pepper the image tracks of Before Need and Before Need Redressed or the cryptic proverbs scattered throughout Red Shift (1984; e.g., "the praise is not pudding," "the earth is frozen for lazy swine," "naked as a frog," "kind children wait till they get nothing").

The joy Nelson takes in torquing film conventions and challenging genre expectations is obvious everywhere. In Light Years and Light Years Expanding (both 1987), for example, she reworks painting traditions of landscapes and still lives such as her use of decaying apples placed over a photograph of snowy forests or, within a landscape, on top of fence posts. In Natural Features, she flouts the traditional ways film credits are shown. The title is first spoken, then later sung, later still, painted. Even more "convention-bending," intertitles reading "by Gunvor Nelson" and "Thank you" appear halfway through the film, i.e., slightly later than (but still well before) the other credits appear. Only the acknowledgments of financial and technical assistance appear, as usual, at the end of the film, though these are sung, not written. As Nelson told my class in Stockholm, she always tries "to look at things from a slightly different angle, so a thing doesn't refer only to itself."

To this end, many of her films foreground the camera's presence; all explore editing. Significantly, from Schmeerguntz on, close-ups prove revelatory, if also elusive, permitting everyday objects to manifest hidden meaning. In Light Years, a finger pokes at a tiny green worm; in Red Shift, a hand wipes steam from a mirror, cleans a hairbrush, sorts jewelry in a drawer; in Old Digs dead birds and a beetle loom large. Beginning with Schmeerguntz, she comments, "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."16

Never has Nelson forgotten the rapture of translations obtained via vision, through a camera, as modified through animation and painting, as organized in editing. The titles she chooses signal her sensitivity to, and appreciation of, her materials: FRAME LINE, RED Shift, LIGHT Years, LIGHT Years Expanding, FIELD Study #2 (1988), Natural FEATURES, TIME Being, Tree-LINE/Trd-GRNS (1990), SNOWDRIFT (a.k.a. SNOW Storm) (2001), and TRACE ELEMENTS (2003). (Save for the word "SNOWDRIFT," the capitals represent my emphasis). Many convey openness and non-fixity thanks to words like "shift," "drift," "expanding."17 Clearly, this insistence on forms and processes stems from her background as a painter. No wonder, then, that she prefers to be called an "artist"; she dislikes the label "director." For her, painting and film are intimately linked. As Anker puts it, Nelson "has managed to transform her passion for the feel of pigments applied on flat surfaces to the paradoxically non-physical interplay of shadow and light. Her films are sensual immersions into sound and image, where every flicker contributes, through its rhythm and texture, to the content of the composition."18

No doubt because she is so fascinated by field and form, Nelson is extraordinarily precise about how her work should be presented and preserved. At the premiere of Frame Line at Canyon Cinema, she covered the emergency exit signs with black cloth to ensure darkness. When she showed Old Digs to my students, she insisted on turning the volume down, cautioning them that they were not meant to try to understand the snippets of voices that punctuate the film save, perhaps, to register "old age" via tremors or pitch. She sends detailed instructions with the PAL video copies of Tree-Line and SNOWDRIFT (a.k.a. Snowstorm) she provides to projectionists, trying to get their attention. In the case of Tree-Line, some words are underlined, others are written in red (here rendered in italics): "The sound should be set as loud as possible at the first titles. In the picture the black should be black. The video is almost B/W except for some blue." With SNOWDRIFT (a.k.a. Snowstorm), the indications are given in capital letters, and underlined: "PLEASE SHOW WITH SLIGHTLY MORE CONTRAST THAN NORMAL." It took literally years to restore Light Years (it took nine trial prints, she wrote me, to give the film the correct color and density; luckily Pacific Film Archive covered the costs). The Frame Line original negative was quite damaged; dirt was ingrained in the surface so that it could not be cleaned. "Prints from Frame Line have a lot of white spots, like snow. This shows up a lot because the film is so dark," Nelson wrote me, sadly. "It is not the restoring lab's fault. I am very unhappy that no 'clean' prints can be made. . . It was very costly to get this far and now I do not have the money to tackle Red Shift."19 This is lamentable, for with Red Shift, "the original negative splices are coming apart and no new prints can be made. A real problem with the old films, and it takes a lot of time and effort to time them again in a new lab. My old labs are closing."20 Nelson wants her work to be experienced at its best, in good prints, under the best possible screening conditions. Nonetheless, she recognizes that even the most exacting assembly, the most painstaking presentation, does not and cannot control reception. Nor would she wish to do so, for she is eager to convey and share her sense that multiple meanings are not just desirable, but necessary.

Personally, I'm touched by the ways that Nelson's works often, as it were, think "through the body," emphasizing tactile relations and/or relationships between women. At the same time, I deeply respect and sincerely value her and Chick Strand's-and others'-desire not to be referred to as "women artists," but rather to be considered "artists," tout court. Times have changed, but Dorothy Wiley's delight that people occasionally wondered whether Schmeerguntz was made by a man or a woman21 remains pertinent: the art surely matters more than the maker. Despite my frequent invocation of Nelson's background and of what she has said to me and to others, I do not want to weight biography or authorial voice unduly. As Janet Staiger cautions, we must beware the "fallacy of assuming filmmakers' statements about their work are obvious (and don't require the same sort of textual attention as texts such as their films). After all, they are part of the authors' techniques of the self."22

Many avant-garde filmmakers prize Nelson's contributions, among them Stan Brakhage, who underscored in 1994 how much he liked her work. He had seen a good deal of it, but singled out the 1988 Field Study #2 in particular, finding it had "affinities" with his own films. As he put it, Field Study #2 was analogously "about remembrance which includes hypnagogic vision or moving visual thinking to counterbalance the dangers of nostalgia or sentimentality." 23 There are, of course, salient differences between Brakhage's and Nelson's oeuvres. Unlike Brakhage, Nelson has never sought to project "a single, authoritative perspective or understanding of the world."24 In her work, in contrast, explorations of new perspectives, investigations of new media, are of the essence.

Listening to and watching her films and videos, I find myself opening to what cannot be expressed through language; I wonder about what may exist beyond consciousness; I pay enhanced attention to sounds and silences, rhythm and movement. But how, as a critic, to convey adequately to others, through words, my sensory impressions and fleeting reflections? I imagine I feel somewhat as Nelson herself does. In most interviews she says something like the following: "As soon as I've said something I instantly realize everything I haven't managed to express. And what I've said acquires too great an importance. I feel sad at being able to express so little of everything I feel, think, and know about film creating/making."25 Yet, especially with avantgarde work, there cannot be simple interpretation, let alone decipherment. I'm reminded of Roland Barthes' insistence that "every text is eternally written here and now. The active relationship between creator, work, and viewer . . . yields 'multiple writings' that resist foreclosed interpretation."26 At issue with Nelson's films must also be resonance, not just signature or translation. Viewer "vibrations" will necessarily vary, and how these works are grouped will sound additional, differing, tones-highlight other, shifting, lusters.

Meanwhile, Nelson's musings on media and memory continue, now with and through video. When I met her in 1997 she was immersed in the challenge this new world presented, both exhausted and invigorated by the opportunities it offered. Characteristically, she looked forward to the greater independence and control that shooting and editing on video would afford her; typically, too, the videos she has completed since then pay great attention to her "materials."

With video, however, both the aspects of the medium and quality of the equipment she owns further encourage minimalism. Her second video, SNOWDRIFT (a.k.a Snowstorm), is exemplary in this regard.27 It begins and ends with snowflakes flying against (another) Falu-red log wall. From the start, behind the gestural camerawork, diagonal lines encounter horizontals. First subtly, then overtly, framing is challenged by what Widding calls the "curtain of snow."28 As the video progresses and the snow continues to fall, the snow flakes are animated and abstracted, becoming blobs, lines and dashes. At times these renderings are reminiscent of video "snow," yet they vary in tempo, alter direction, and even revolve as colors pulsate in and out punctuated by moments of black and white. In a middle section, an oval plaque of a moose (another quintessentially Swedish marker) can be glimpsed.29 Nearer the end, lines metamorphose into rectangular planes, then turn back again to lines; always "real" images interrupt or mingle with animated ones. Busier than usual, the sound track is marked by its own augmentations and diminutions: blowing snow becomes white noise; dissonant synthesized sounds, syllables sung by a choir, clangs (from a bell?) alternate with silence. As the work ends, "by Gunvor Grundel Nelson" appears through the snow in white outlined by black, then the image fades to white, and finally goes dark, leaving behind memories of visual and audial variations that echo on, "like a sound that only reminds us of a word."30

The more I experience, savor, and reflect on Nelson's films-and now her videos-the more grateful I become for her ceaseless searching.31 As she explains, each work begins with a strategy or an attitude in mind, then proceeds as an investigation of what it should be. She finds happiness in the surprise, the revelation, and enjoys both the freedom of filming and the strictness of editing.32 I like that she makes a point of listening to her material, 33 that she's sensitive to nuance and context, that she plays with visual and musical dynamics, that she considers both iconic and plastic dimensions. I'm thus eager to see Nelson's two latest videos, New Evidence (2006) and True to Life (2006), which I missed on their premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in October 2006. With Nelson's work as muse, I look forward to, myself, musing further on signature, translation, and resonance.

Notes

1 For readings of Nelson's early films as "feminist" and/or "feminine" see Robert DiMatteo, "Gunvor Nelson: Capturing the Nether Regions of Femininity on Film," San Francisco Bay Guardian (October 15, 1976): n. p.; Lucy Fischer, Shot/Counter-Shot: Film Tradition and Women's Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 26-31; June M. Gill, "The Films of Gunvor Nelson," Film Quarterly 30.3 (Spring 1977): 28-36; D. Nelson, "Imagery of the Archetypal Feminine in the Works of Six Women Filmmakers," Quarterly Review of Film Studies 3.4 (Fall 1978): 495-506; Brenda Richardson, "An Interview with Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley," Film Quarterly 25.1 (Fall 1971): 34-39.

2 Comment made after the screening of Schmeerguntz at the 2002 conference, "Gunvor Nelson: Still Moving i ljud och bild," held in Karlstad. In their joint 1971 interview with Brenda Richardson, Wiley was more open to the promotion of women's art as art by women, though she has not sought to position herself as a "woman artist" either (Richardson, "An Interview," 37). Her single-authored films, available from Canyon Cinema, include Zane Forbidden (US, 1972), The Weenie Worm (US, 1972), Letters (US, 1972), Cabbage (US, 1972), Miss Jesus Fries on Grill (US, 1973), and The Birth of Seth Andrew Kinmount (US, 1977).

3 Steve Anker, "The Films of Gunvor Nelson," in Gunvor Nelson: Still Moving i ljud och bild, ed. John Sundholm (Karlstad: Karlstad University, 2002), 18.

4 The five early co-signed films include Schmeerguntz, Fog Pumas, Five Artists: Bill- BobBillBillBob, One and the Same, and Before Need. Except for One and the Same, which was made with Freude (Bartlett), all were made with Dorothy Wiley. (The later Before Need Redressed was too.) One might consider a sixth early film to be co-authored as well: Take Off star and producer Magda claimed co-authorship, to Nelson's dismay.

5 "Translate," "translation." Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 7th ed. (Springfield: G. & C. Merriam Co, 1965), 940-941.

6 Early blurbs obtained from Canyon Cinema include a quote from Amos Vogel's Village Voice review and Karyn Kay's program notes. Vogel says that the film, which screened at the second Whitney Museum avant-garde series in 1971, "captures in haunting, intensely lyrical images, fragments of the coming to consciousness of a child girl." He finds Nelson "the revelation of the program. . .[a] true poetress [sic] of the visual cinema" (Canyon Cinema Cooperative, "Xeroxed catalogue material," [n. d.], 2-3). Kay writes, "Oona is transformed into an eerie, almost dream-like figure. The everyday, the personal, takes on dramatic proportions. The child is no longer simply a child, but she is representative of feminine myths of beauty and strength. . . ." Other discussions on My Name Is Oona include Steve Anker, "Gunvor Nelson and the American Avant-Garde Film," in Gunvor Nelson and the Avant-Garde, ed. John Sundholm (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003), 115-116; Scott MacDonald, "Gunvor Nelson," A Critical Cinema 3 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 188-189; and Anders Pettersson, "Interview," in Gunvor Nelson: Still Moving i ljud och bild (Karlstad: Karlstad University, 2002), ed. John Sundholm, 143-144.

7 Nelson is even more attentive to sound in the videos, Sundholm argues, because visuals are less precise with video. John Sundholm, "Gunvor Nelson and the Aesthetics of Materiality," Vers. 2. http://www.avantofestival.com. 28 May 2004.

8 Petersson, "Interview," 158.

9 Astrid Sderbergh Widding describes the film as "a tightly-knit meditation about a place, both well known and foreign, both carried in memory and changed beyond recognition." ("Ett kabinett fr vardagens visuella under," ["A Cabinet for Everyday Wonders"], Svenska Dagbladet [August 28, 2002], "Kultur" section: 9, my translation.)

10 Letter to the author, January 10, 2005.

11 See Sundholm, "Gunvor Nelson and the Aesthetics of Sensual Materiality."

12 Anders Petersson, Gunvor Nelson: Om avantgardefilm i allmnhet och 'personal film' i synnerhet [Gunvor Nelson: About Avant-Garde Film in General and 'Personal Film' in Particular] (Karlstad: Karlstad University Studies 29, 2002), 67. My translation.

13 D.N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 145, 149. Rodowick/Deleuze are speaking of Duras's and Straub-Huillet's experimental fiction films and Claude Lanzmann's documentary, Shoah (FR, 1985). Compare Steve Anker's assessment: "each gathered image [I'd add and underline, 'each collected sound'] was a fragmentary, recovered object which was uniquely and visually expressive unto itself, and which lent itself to being sutured into tapestries of complex emotional resonance and multiple meanings." ("Gunvor Nelson and the American Avant-Garde Film," 119.)

14 Earlier films that Nelson has mentioned were important to her at the time include Dallí and Buñuel's An Andalusian Dog (SP, 1929), Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (FR, 1946) and Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon (US, 1943).

15 "Gedigna" means both "solid" and "native."

16 MacDonald, "Gunvor Nelson," 186.

17 The title of the first book in Swedish devoted to her work, Still Moving i ljud och bild, was Nelson's suggestion (Pettersson, Gunvor Nelson, 74). Once again, Nelson's word play combines Swedish (which translates to "in sound and image") with English; it also evokes time ("still moving"), travel ("moving") and, of course, core aspects of film and video, i.e. stills and movement.

18 Anker, "The Films of Gunvor Nelson," 9.

19 Nelson, Letter of January 10, 2005.

20 Nelson, E-mail of December 9, 2003.

21 For Wiley's comments, made about a screening held at Reed College, see Richardson, "An Interview with Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley," 37.

22 Janet Staiger, "Authorship Approaches," in Authorship and Film, ed. David A. Gerstner and Janet Staiger (London: Routledge, 2003), 27-57.

23 Suranjan Ganguly, "Stan Brakhage: The 60th Birthday Interview," in Experimental Cinema: The Film Reader, ed. Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (London: Routledge, 2002), 139-162.

24 Anker, "Gunvor Nelson and American Avant-Garde Film," 123.

25 Pettersson, "Interview," 162. Compare, for example, "When I utter something, I immediately feel all the things I've not said, and what I have said inevitably takes on too much importance." MacDonald, "Gunvor Nelson," 183-184.

26 Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," in Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142-148.

27 For other discussions of Tree-Line and SNOWDRIFT (a.k.a Snowstorm), see Fred Andersson, "Technology and Poetry," in Gunvor Nelson: Still Moving i ljud och bild, ed. John Sundholm (Karlstad: Karlstad University, 2002), 91-98. See also Sundholm, "Gunvor Nelson and the Aesthetics of Sensual Materiality," and Astrid Sderbergh Widding, "The Material World Transformed: Gunvor Nelson's Videoworks," in Gunvor Nelson and the Avant-Garde, ed. John Sundholm (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003), 125-134.

28 Widding, "The Material World Transformed," 132.

29 Nelson told me that the moose was her neighbor's and was placed in a window across from her apartment at the time. Here again, then, is an example of how she taps and transforms the everyday, incorporates the personal, and transports the national in/through her art.

30 Andersson, "Technology and Poetry," 98.

31 Nelson's confession to Pettersson is telling: "I have tried not to repeat myself. . . . I am afraid of becoming 'too skillful'. . . . You risk losing that which is unique and that which you have not done before." Pettersson, "Interview," 148.

32 Response at the 2002 Karlstad conference.

33 As she says, "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." Pettersson, Gunvor Nelson, 80, citing a five-page handout compiled for the editing classes she taught, 1983-1985, at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Partial reprint of Chris Holmlund, "Excavating Visual Fields, Layering Audial Frames," in Avant-garde Women Filmmakers, ed. Robin Blaetz, 2007. Courtesy of Duke University Press.

Chris Holmlund chairs the Cinema Studies Program at the University of Tennessee. She is the author of Impossible Bodies (Routledge, 2002), co-editor (with Justin Wyatt) of Contemporary American Independent Film: From the Margins to the Mainstream (Routledge, 2005) and (with Cynthia Fuchs) of Between the Sheets, In the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, Gay Documentary (Minnesota University Press, 1997). Current book projects include American Cinema of the 1990s: Themes and Variations (Rutgers University Press) and Stars in Action (BFI).