The Cinematheque

16mm Prints

“Pure sensuality … Moons Pool is both a celebration and radical re-experiencing of bodily limits.”

Steve Anker, Gunvor Nelson and the Avant-Garde

There is no single Gunvor Nelson style, but each of her films is animated by a similar desire, one in favour of complexity and the explosive modulation of sound and image. Four of her greatest works screen in this program, including My Name Is Oona, a mythic portrait of the filmmaker’s daughter set to an audio track of Oona’s voice in hypnotic repetition. (Amos Vogel called it ​“a magic incantation of self-realization.”) The musician Patrick Gleeson assisted on Oona as well as Take Off, a striptease pushed to logical extremes. That film’s mounting progression is unique for Nelson; more common is the work that starts at full velocity and stays there, as in the aquatic existential dream of Moons Pool and the car-window travelogue of Light Years Expanding. The latter is a standout of Nelson’s collage period, and investigates the endless mutability of single frames of film when remade across mediums. Like all of her best work, it is exhilarating and densely packed with formal ideas.

Take Off
USA 1972
Gunvor Nelson
10 min. 16mm

Light Years Expanding
Sweden 1988
Gunvor Nelson
25 min. 16mm

My Name Is Oona
USA 1969
Gunvor Nelson
10 min. 16mm

Moons Pool
USA 1973
Gunvor Nelson
15 min. Digital

“I didn’t want a normal, ​‘cute’ picture of Oona … As a child, you’re pretty secure in your known world, but the rest is very mysterious and scary, maybe there are monsters and trolls lurking out there, even if you’ve never seen them.”

Gunvor Nelson