Gunvor Nelson
Call & Response: Echo

Sunday, Nov. 9th 2PM
The Brattle Theatre
40 Brattle Street
Cambridge
Massachusetts 02138

RPM Festival and the Brattle Theatre co-present a special screening program Gunvor Nelson: Call & Response: echo (The second part of this series) , honoring one of the highly acclaimed Avard Garde filmmakers Gunvor Nelson. This program features a total of five films from different decades of her long lasting career. Curated by Sarah Keller, Sara Jordeno, Shira Segal and Wenhua Shi.

GUNVOR NELSON (1931–2025) was a prominent figure in American and Swedish avant-garde cinema. Born in Sweden, she studied painting before relocating to California in 1953, where she became involved in the Canyon Cinema collective, encountering filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Chris Strand, and Bruce Baillie. Nelson’s deeply personal yet shockingly universal films embody extensive experimentation—including animation, stop-motion, scratching, or painting on film, lens inventions, sound manipulation, and exploration of interiors, framing, and nature –processes that served to explore her experiences related to family and identity, her life as an expatriate, and the cycle of birth and death. She also influenced generations of filmmakers through her teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute (1970–1992).
Returning permanently to Sweden in 1992, Nelson embraced digital video and received renewed recognition in the Swedish art world.

Post-screening discussion:
Sara Jordeno (Rhode Island School of Design)
Sarah Keller (UMass-Boston)
Shira Segal (MIT)
Wenhua Shi (RPM Festival)


Sara Jordenö is an award-winning visual artist, filmmaker, curator and researcher based in Boston, MA. Their research-based practice emerged out of a series of ‘turns’ in contemporary art in the 1990s and 2000’s - the documentary turn, the social turn and the educational turn. For over 20 years, Jordenö has been engaged in an experimental and innovative interdisciplinary artistic and curatorial practice, which has gained international recognition. Their work has been distributed and disseminated in the fields of non-fiction and experimental film, in socially engaged public and site-specific art and in Migration Studies.

Sarah Keller is associate professor of art and cinema studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is the author of Barbara Hammer: Pushing Out of the Frame (Wayne State Press, 2021), Anxious Cinephilia: Pleasure and Peril at the Movies (Columbia, 2020), Maya Deren: Incomplete Control (Columbia, 2014) and the co-editor of Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (2012).

Shira Segal has designed and taught a wide range of film history, theory, and criticism courses, with a focus on avant-garde and documentary. As the former director of Film Studies at UAlbany, she oversaw curriculum redesign initiatives and served as co-chair to the Experimental Film and Media scholarly interest group at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS).
She received her PhD in Film and Media from Indiana University. Her dissertation "Home Movies and Home Birth: The Avant-garde Childbirth Film and Pregnancy in New Media" includes filmmaker interviews and research with the James Stanley Brakhage Collection, housed by the Archives at the University of Colorado Boulder Libraries. Her MA in Cultural Memory from the University of London focused on Hollis Frampton.

Moons Pool
| 1973 | 15 minutes | Color | SOUND

Fog Pumas
with Dorothy Wiley | 1967-68 | 25 minutes | B&W | SOUND

Snowdrift
| 2001 | 9 minutes | Color | SOUND

New Evidence
| 2006 | 22 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Total: 75 mins

All digtal files from Filmform

All 16mm prints from Canyon Cinema

Moons Pool
Gunvor Nelson | 1973 | 15 minutes | Color | SOUND

Moons Pool marks a new path in Gunvor Nelson’s filmmaking in which she develops her interest in creating a weave of movements and superimpositions. The film that is mostly shot underwater, in a pool, begins with footage of water and a close-up of Nelson from which we move to her body immersed in water in a bath-tub from which yet another transition occurs to a pool with male and female naked bodies swimming underwater. The latter part of the film is almost totally liberated from speech, and has a dreamlike, complex soundtrack consisting of sounds of waves, voices, water and music woven together into a seamless web of sounds.

"A masterful and lyrical use of the film medium to portray the search for identity and resolution of self. Photographed under water, live bodies are intercut with natural landscapes creating powerful mood changes and images surfaced from the unconscious." - Freude Bartlett

New Evidence
Gunvor Nelson | 2006 | 22 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

“Shadows of people inhabit a wintry road, casting darkness over the tracks. What happens when this substance is washed away by fleeting reflections and blended into new matter, color and forms? And sound:feet tramping endlessly round, round like hands on a clock. This is happening now …” - Sue Anne Moody

“A cascade of never-ending water flows through the video and drowns the shadows in a rhythm that is both variable and searching.” - Gunvor Nelson

Snowdrift
Gunvor Nelson | 2001 | 9 minutes | Color | SOUND

Movement begins and ends with snowflakes, fleeting, floating, whirling and dancing in constant restlessness. Sudden changes in direction, composition, background, density, color and contrast interrupt the perpetual flow.