Wednesday, November 9, 2016

11/9 Red Shift: the Films by Gunvor Nelson

Program:
TAKE OFF 1972 b/w video 10 min
Ellion Ness, a thoroughly professional stripper, goes through her paces, bares her body, and then, astonishingly and literally, transcends it. While the film makes a forceful political statement on the image of woman and the true meaning of stripping, the intergalactic transcendence of its ending locates it firmly within the mainstream of joyous humanism and stubborn optimism.
MY NAME IS OONA 1969 b/w video 10 min.
"My Name is Oona captures in haunting, intensely lyrical images fragments of the coming to consciousness of a child girl. A series of extremely brief flashes of her moving through night-lit space or woods in sensuous negative, separated by rapid fades into blackness, burst upon us like a fairy-tale princess, with a late sun only partially outlining her and the animal in silvery filigree against the encroaching darkness; one of the most perfect recent examples of poetic cinema." - Amos Vogel
RED SHIFT 1984 b/w, 16mm 50 min.
This magnus opus is a domestic symphony from a woman's point of view, the portrait of a grandmother, mother and child and their home. The women and their personal objects are mostly seen alone or relating to one another (except for touching scenes of the grandmother and grandfather together).
A key aspect of RED SHIFT is the reading of selections from Calamity Jane's "Diaries", the most narrative aspect of the film. The Diaries are read against activities seen through a window, life passing by (people walking in winter, a river flowing). They tell how Jane lost her daughter and had to survive by using her talents to act like a tough and physically competitive man...

BIO
Swedish filmmaker Gunvor Grundel Nelson was born in 1931 in Stockholm, Sweden. Now living in Kristinehamn, Sweden. She has worked as an experimental filmmaker since the 1960s. Some of her most widely known works were created while she lived in the Bay Area in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, where she became well established among other artists in the avant-garde film circles of the 60s and to the present (Gill, 28).As of 2006 she has to her credit twenty films, five videos, and one video installation (Holmlund, 67).

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