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Doors 7pm / Screening 7:30pm
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For Nelson, film is a plastic medium whose potential for personal expression demands a denial of conventional film language and syntax on the part of both the maker and the viewer. Her frequently ambiguous and haunting images arise from deeply intuitive personal responses to a subject or to a powerful feeling, and they often bear multilayered metaphorical and tactile meaning. Her complex and exacting montage strategies raise more questions than they answer, and often leave the viewer puzzled once outside of the film’s powerful aesthetic grip. […] [F]rom her first film Schmeerguntz (1966, co-made with Dorothy Wiley), […] Nelson has managed to transform her passion for the feel of pigments applied on flat surfaces to the paradoxically nonphysical 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. (Steve Anker: “The Films of Gunvor Nelson.” Published 2002 in Gunvor Nelson: Still Moving, John Sundholm, ed.)

Born 1931 in Kristinehamn, Sweden, artist Gunvor Nelson lived in northern California 1953–1993, during which time she pursued a painting and art-making practice and, in 1966, began filmmaking. In meticulous work created over the subsequent five decades, Nelson’s body of 16mm film (and later digital video) explores interiority and natural landscapes (in the Bay Area as well as in Sweden), presenting a lushly subjective worldview unequaled in the history of the medium. Following her January 2025 passing (at age 93), Cinematheque and Canyon Cinema celebrate the life of this master artist. (Steve Polta)

SCREENING:
Tree–Line (1998) by Gunvor Nelson; digital video, color, sound, 8 minutes. Exhibition file from Filmform
Schmeerguntz (1966) by Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley; 16mm, color, sound, 15 minutes. Print from Canyon Cinema
My Name is Oona (1969) by Gunvor Nelson; 16mm, color, sound, 10 minutes. Print from Canyon Cinema
Time Being (1991) by Gunvor Nelson; 16mm, color, silent, 8 minutes. Print from Canyon Cinema
Moons Pool (1973) by Gunvor Nelson; 16mm screened as digital video, color, sound, 15 minutes. Exhibition file from Filmform
Light Years (1987) by Gunvor Nelson; 16mm, color, 28 minutes. Print from Canyon Cinema
TRT: 84 minutes