Gunvor Nelson Tribute: Light Years Expanding
This program is presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive screening series Gunvor Nelson Tribute Trilogy. Learn more at cinema.ucla.edu.
In person: Introduction by film historian and curator Steve Anker.
A pioneer of personal cinema and feminist film who never shied away from challenges, Gunvor Nelson’s (1931–2025) innovative films combine painting, collage and sound experimentation, embodying humor, resistance, intimacy and tactile sensation. Nelson’s early films frequently reflect the inner and outer qualities, thoughts and voices of women in the 1960s and ’70s; homes, daughters and mothers are particularly important themes in her work. Moving from painting to still photography, from analog film to digital media, as each new medium collides with a multitude of everyday objects, her work delves deeper into the texture of life and the saturated past, uncovering an intuitive yet delicate sensibility that retreats from the real world into another, imaginatively reconstructed one. Born in Sweden but most closely associated with the San Francisco Bay area’s avant-garde film community, Nelson inspired countless experimental filmmakers and artists through her work and her time teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute. After returning to Sweden in 1992, she continued exploring and experimenting with new audiovisual languages, leaving us with a rich and unimaginable legacy.
Light Years Expanding (1988)
Light Years Expanding is a further elaboration of Light Years, Gunvor Nelson’s journey into the Swedish landscape in which she blends animation with live-action. Whereas movement was one of the prime characteristics of Light Years, Light Years Expanding revolves more around the image-work, foreshadowing her last and most complicated collage film Natural Features.
Director: Gunvor Nelson.
Old Digs (1993)
“I was enormously impressed and bowled over by the beauty and artistry. It is one of the few films that I have ever seen that gave me the same feeling that I get when I see painting that I really respond to on a gut/heart level. The images are very powerful. The poetry and the subtlety of the content too. The editing/rhythms all seemed perfect. The sound track kept disappearing from consciousness (exactly right), but never stopped working with the pictures. Masterpiece.”—filmmaker Robert Nelson
Director: Gunvor Nelson.
Field Study #2 (1988)
Field Study #2 develops further Nelson’s painterly animation aesthetics. This time the imagery is not created by a recording camera after which they are reworked, but instead the images and sounds appear out of their own world. The soundtrack consists of animal sounds and a serious male voice reciting names of animals in Latin. It is a hilarious work that makes fun of the educational film and our expectations upon the film screen to constitute a window to an outer world. Field Study #2 urges one to look and listen while emphasizing the comic and absurd, the latter a trait that runs through so much of Gunvor Nelson’s filmmaking and which was the impetus for her to start filming with Dorothy Wiley in the ’60s. The film ends with a thank you to Dorothy Wiley.
Director: Gunvor Nelson.
Natural Features (1990)
“In Natural Features, Gunvor Nelson mingles hundreds of still images with 3-D objects and ‘real’ images photographed through glass layerings into a free-associative and playfully bizarre form of animation. Perhaps no film has more successfully blended an evident passion for painting with a sensitivity to filmmaking such as lush pigments alternate with and punctuate the different photographic layerings.”—curator Steve Anker
Director: Gunvor Nelson.
The UCLA Film & Television Archive is a division of UCLA Library, and presents its public programs in the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer, among other venues. For more information about the Archive, visit cinema.ucla.edu.
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