March 22, 27, 28, 2026

IN THREE PROGRAMS

Presented by Rotations, Los Angeles Filmforum, UCLA Film & Television Archive, and the Academy Museum

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.

This citywide, multivenue retrospective will cover a range of Nelson’s works, from her debut film, a feminist classic, Schmeerguntz (1966) (co-directed with Dorothy Wiley), to the late abstract video art Snowdrift a.k.a. Snowstorm (2001), with several other essential and influential masterpieces created in the years between.

The program trilogy will be co-presented by Rotations, Los Angeles Filmforum, the Academy Museum and the UCLA Film & Television Archive on March 22, 27 and 28.

Series curated by Cherlyn Hsing-Hsin Liu and Steve Anker.

TRIBUTE I, RED SHIFT ~ hosted by Rotations & LA Filfmforum ~

Introduction by film historian and curator Steve Anker.

March 22, 2026 | 2220 Arts + Archives | 7:30 PM | TICKETS

Red Shift, 1984, 50 min., 16mm, b&w

Red Shift is one of Gunvor Nelson’s most admired films, a dense narrative film about family relations in which the various roles are played by members of her family. The film merges two diegetic times, both present and past, and pending between close-ups and long shots. Nelson’s depiction of family life is both candid and considerate, displaying an amalgamation of emotions ranging from delight to distress. —Professor John Sundholm, Stockholm University

Frame Line, 1983, 22 min., 16mm, b&w

Frame Line is Nelson’s first collage film. The film that inaugurated her original series of animated films, all made at the Film Workshop in Stockholm. Frame Line is a reflection on Stockholm and Sweden, on Nelson’s return to her native country and a place that is both familiar and distant, both beautiful and ugly at the same time. The film begins with images and glimpses of Stockholm that Nelson has collected, then developing this audiovisual material into a new visual work where animation becomes a way of discovering both what the camera has captured and what can be created anew through free association. —Professor John Sundholm, Stockholm University

Time Being, 1991, 8 min., 16mm, b&w

Time Being is a commemoration in four sequences of Nelson’s mother. The film that starts and ends with lengthy black leader, is a brutal yet beautiful depiction of her mother dying and how the bond between them is cut off. After a prologue follows a series of three shots, each beginning in static takes of her mother lying in a bed at a hospital. For each shot the distance to the mother increases and the camera moves closer towards Nelson. —Professor John Sundholm, Stockholm University

TRIBUTE II, MOONS POOL ~ hosted by The Academy Museum ~

Introduction by film historian and curator Steve Anker.

Schmeerguntz (with Dorothy Wiley), 1966, U.S., 15 min., 16mm, b&w

This was the film that set everything in motion. Schmeerguntz, coined after Gunvor Nelson’s father’s nonsense word for “sandwich” (smörgås in Swedish), is a hilarious, grotesque and grave attack on the public ideal of the American housewife. Critic Ernest Callenbach wrote in excitement that “A society which hides its animal functions beneath a shiny public surface deserves to have such films as Schmeerguntz shown everywhere.” —Professor John Sundholm, Stockholm University

My Name is Oona, 1969, U.S., 10 min., 16mm, b&w

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 rhythmical structure that accompanies the visual structure of the film that plunges into the experience of a child where both bliss and fear reign. As so often in Nelson’s oeuvre, there is a female subtext too: it is male voices that execute their authority upon Oona, whereas as a girl she is still equal to boys of her own age. —Professor John Sundholm, Stockholm University.

Fog Pumas, 1967, U.S., 25 min., 16mm, b&w, color

Fog Pumas is the second film that Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley shot together. It received one of the grand prizes at the Knokke Experimental Film Festival, EXPRMTL, in 1967-68. The film is a hilarious, liberating exploration of absurd imagery and situations in which Nelson and Wiley also make fun of some classical avant-garde film techniques. It is an empowering film, made in the spirit of exploring the potentialities of filmmaking and insisting upon having fun while doing it. —Professor John Sundholm, Stockholm University

Moons Pool, 1973, U.S., 15 min., digital, color

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 bathtub. 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.—Professor John Sundholm, Stockholm University

Snowdrift a.k.a. Snowstorm, 2001, U.S., 9 min., digital, color

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.—Professor John Sundholm, Stockholm University

TRIBUTE III, LIGHT YEARS EXPANDING ~ hosted by UCLA Film & Television Archive ~

Introduction by film historian and curator Steve Anker.

Light Years Expanding, 1988, Sweden, 25 min., 16mm, color

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. —Professor John Sundholm, Stockholm University

Old Digs, 1993, Sweden, 20 min., 16mm, color

“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

Field Study #2, 1988, Sweden, 8 min., 16mm, color

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. —Professor John Sundholm, Stockholm University

Natural Features, 1990, Sweden, 28 min., 16mm, color

“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