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.

Take off
| 1972 | 10 minutes | B&W | SOUND

Light Years Expanding
| 1988 | 25 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Kirsa Nicholina
| 1969 | 16 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

My Name is Oona
| 1969 | 10 minutes | B&W | SOUND

Old Digs
| 1993 | 20 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Total: 81 mins

All 16mm prints from Canyon Cinema

Canyon Cinema Foundation is dedicated to educating the public about independent, non-commercial, experimental, avant-garde, and artist-made moving images. We manifest this commitment by providing access to our unrivaled collection to universities and cultural organizations worldwide, as well as cultivating scholarship and appreciation of artist-made cinema. We ensure the experience of rare film works in their original medium while also reaching new audiences through our growing digital distribution program.

Canyon Cinema’s unique collection of artist-made films – comprised of digital media, 8mm, Super 8, 16mm, and 35mm prints – traces the vital history of the experimental and avant-garde filmmaking movements from 1921 to the present. With a strong emphasis on American West Coast and San Francisco Bay Area filmmakers, we are the access point to approximately 4,000 ground-breaking works representing 320 artists.

Take Off
Gunvor Nelson | 1972 | 10 minutes | B&W | SOUND

Starring Ellion Ness. Sound by Pat Gleeson.

A dance, a documentary, a metaphysical strip tease.

"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." - B. Ruby Rich, Chicago Art Institute

Awards: First Prize, Berkeley Film Festival; Prize, Ann Arbor Film Festival; Humboldt State Film Festival.

Kirsa Nicholina
Gunvor Nelson | 1969 | 16 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

A birth film.

“The film is a discovery of the eternal beauty and wonder of Nature. In extremely graphic detail, we watch the birth, becoming so involved, we’re feeling the heat and tension. KIRSA NICHOLINA is a simple, poetic statement that is fantastically involving and moving.” – Danny Weiss

"That Gunvor Nelson is indeed one of the most gifted of our poetic film humanists is revealed in KIRSA NICHOLINA, her masterpiece. This deceptively simple film of a child being born to a couple in their home is an almost classic manifesto of the new sensibility, a proud affirmation of man amidst technology, genocide, and ecological destruction. Birth is presented not as an antiseptic, 'medical' experience (the usual birth film focuses on an anonymous vagina appropriately surrounded by a white shroud) but as a living-through of a primitive mystery, a spiritual celebration, a rite of passage. True to the newest sensibility, it does not aggressively proselytize but conveys its ideology by force of example. With husband and friends quietly present, the strikingly pretty young woman, in fetching terrycloth and red socks, is practically nude throughout; her whole body is seen at times, and for once the continuity between lovepartner and birth-giver is maintained; she remains 'erotic.' We never once forget that she is a woman and that the new life came from sexual desire ...." - Amos Vogel, The Village Voice

Award: Diplomate, Oberhausen Film Festival
Exhibition: National Theatre, London; Finnish and Swedish TV.

My Name is Oona
Gunvor Nelson | 1969 | 10 minutes | B&W | SOUND

My Name is Oona was Nelson’s final breakthrough on the American avant-garde film scene. The sound consists of Nelson’s daughter, Oona, repeating the names of the days of the week and of her saying “my name is Oona”. The latter is edited into an expressive rythmical structure that accompanies the visual structure of the film that plunges into the experience of a child where both bliss and fear reigns. As so often in Nelson’s oeuvre there is a female subtext too: it is male voices that executes their authority upon Oona, whereas as a girl she is still equal to boys of her own age.

"But the revelation of the program is Gunvor Nelson, true poetess of the visual cinema. 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. Throughout the entire film, the girl, compulsively and as if in awe, repeats her name, until it becomes a magic incantation of self-realization." - Amos Vogel, The Village Voice

"It is one of the first filmic masterpieces of the new wave films." - Larry Jordan

Exhibition: Oberhausen Film Festival; BBC TV; CBS TV; Cannes Film Festival. Sold to French TV.