The Cinematheque

16mm Prints

“[The] product of a master artist confidently in control of her materials.”

Steve Anker, Gunvor Nelson and the Avant-Garde, on Red Shift

Gunvor Nelson’s interest in the varieties of experience for women across generations and social roles is centralized (and intensified) in these two films, her first solo work and her magnum opus. Kirsa Nicholina captures the home birth of a neighbour’s child. It is in some respects her simplest film, but this very quality made Amos Vogel call it her masterpiece and devote pages to it in his seminal Film as a Subversive Art. Red Shift is Nelson’s most narratively driven film. It works as a dramatic memory piece and, despite its extreme macrophotographic abstraction, could be placed next to the studies of domestic space, power, and longing of Pinter or Akerman. Three generations of women inhabit a house, their pacing chores and routines matched to a soundtrack of all the mundane yet scathingly raw phrases of girlhood and motherhood—the pressurized need for love and freedom and perfection. Wild West legend Calamity Jane’s letters to her estranged daughter punctuate the film and further expand its scale of time.

Kirsa Nicholina
USA 1969
Gunvor Nelson
16 min. 16mm

Red Shift
Sweden 1984
Gunvor Nelson
50 min. 16mm

“[My] second viewing of Red Shift makes me want to see it, some day, a third time … The mystery of Red Shift is perfectly kept, very consciously and consistently, by maintaining an absolute distance from the subject matter.”

Jonas Mekas

“The most beautiful, most personal, and most expressive film about mother-daughter relationships that I have ever seen … A radical film; it sets new measures for avant-garde filmmaking dealing with personal problems.”

Alf Bold, Arsenal Filminstitut