Gunvor Nelson Tribute III: Light Years Expanding

Free admission. No advance reservations. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event.

Introduction by film scholar Steve Anker and a pre-recorded video with filmmaker Lynne Sachs.

Screening 1 of 4

Light Years Expanding

Year: 1988
Country: Sweden
Runtime: 25 min.
16mm. Color.

Light Years Expanding is a further elaboration of Light Years, Gunvor Nelson’s journey into the Swedish landscape in which she blends animation with live-action. Whereas movement was one of the prime characteristics of Light Years, Light Years Expanding revolves more around the image-work, foreshadowing her last and most complicated collage film Natural Features.—Professor John Sundholm, Stockholm University

Director: Gunvor Nelson.

Screening 2 of 4

Old Digs

Year: 1993
Country: Sweden
Language: English
Runtime: 20 min.
16mm. Color

“I was enormously impressed and bowled over by the beauty and artistry. It is one of the few films that I have ever seen that gave me the same feeling that I get when I see painting that I really respond to on a gut/heart level. The images are very powerful. The poetry and the subtlety of the content too. The editing/rhythms all seemed perfect. The sound track kept disappearing from consciousness (exactly right), but never stopped working with the pictures. Masterpiece.”—filmmaker Robert Nelson

Director: Gunvor Nelson.

Screening 3 of 4

Field Study #2

Year: 1988
Country: Sweden
Runtime: 8 min.
16mm. Color.

Field Study #2 develops further Nelson’s painterly animation aesthetics. This time the imagery is not created by a recording camera after which they are reworked, but instead the images and sounds appear out of their own world. The soundtrack consists of animal sounds and a serious male voice reciting names of animals in Latin. It is a hilarious work that makes fun of the educational film and our expectations upon the film screen to constitute a window to an outer world. Field Study #2 urges one to look and listen while emphasizing the comic and absurd, the latter a trait that runs through so much of Gunvor Nelson’s filmmaking and which was the impetus for her to start filming with Dorothy Wiley in the ’60s. The film ends with a thank you to Dorothy Wiley.—Professor John Sundholm, Stockholm University

Director: Gunvor Nelson.

Screening 4 of 4

Natural Features

Year: 1990
Country: Sweden
Language: English
Runtime: 28 min.
16mm. Color.

“In Natural Features, Gunvor Nelson mingles hundreds of still images with 3-D objects and ‘real’ images photographed through glass layerings into a free-associative and playfully bizarre form of animation. Perhaps no film has more successfully blended an evident passion for painting with a sensitivity to filmmaking such as lush pigments alternate with and punctuate the different photographic layerings.”—curator Steve Anker

Director: Gunvor Nelson.