Gunvor Nelson Artist File
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Gunvor Nelson (1931–2025) was one of the most highly acclaimed filmmakers in American avant-garde film. Born in Stockholm, Sweden, Nelson grew up Kristinehamn and moved to northern California in 1953 to study art and art history. Nelson began making films in the early 1960s, releasing her first two films—Schmeerguntz (1966) and Fog Pumas (1967)—Both collaborations with Dorothy Wiley—eventually creating over twenty-five films and digital video works, described by Steve Anker as “one of the great bodies of independent work in the history of the medium.” An uncompromising filmmaker, Nelson regards her own works as “personal films,” a recurring element of which is the connection with her own life and experiences. The early films are based around the experiences of a younger woman, culminating in My Name Is Oona (1969), an expressive portrait of her daughter and Moons Pool (1973), an existentially expressive underwater journey which centres on her own body. With Trollstenen (1976), she began a series of films about Kristinehamn and her family. Typically for Nelson, elements which are local and private fuse together with the general and universal. Nelson’s family and generational study Red Shift (1984), and her painfully sensitive portrayal of her dying mother in Time Being (1991) are regarded as the high points of her family and hometown productions. Nelson moved back to Kristinehamn in 1993, a homecoming already hinted at in her rhythmically edited collage film Frame Line (1983). Having returned to Sweden she quickly moved on to digital video and was rediscovered in Swedish art circles, resulting in a number of awards and retrospectives both at home and abroad. During Nelson’s life in northern California (1953–1993), she was a central figure in the regional art and filmmaking and, with her husband Robert Nelson, played a key role in the development of Canyon Cinema and screened regularly with San Francisco Cinematheque. Nelson also influenced generations of filmmakers in her role as a teacher at the San Francisco Art Institute (1970-1992). In 2019, Nelson’s My Name Is Oona was selected by the US Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" (Artist bio adapted from Filmform)
Cinematheque’s digital collection, the Gunvor Nelson Artist File contains twelve items, dated 1970–1992, documenting Nelson’s life and career, including promotional ephemera, program reviews, program notes, correspondence and writings by Chick Strand, James Irwin, Dorothy Wiley and Nelson herself. The twelve items in this digital collection were selected for digitization from Cinematheque’s larger artist file on Nelson.
This digital collection was created in partnership with California Revealed.
