Signature, Translation and Resonance in Gunvor Nelson's Films

Signature and Translation in Gunvor Nelson's Films

In the male-dominated contexts of 1960s avant-garde film, filmmakers Bruce Baillie, Bruce Conner and Stan Brakhage were among those foremost in the West Coast "eye." It was perhaps inevitable, therefore, that Swedish artist Gunvor Nelson, who had lived in the Bay Area from the mid 1960s, and collaborator Dorothy Wiley should initially be received as feminist filmmakers, especially since their first collage film, Schmeerguntz (US, 1965), wittily contrasts 1940s—1960s mass media constructs of what femininity "should" be (via clips and collages taken from the Miss America pageant, television fitness shows and magazine advertisements) with Wiley's daily routines while pregnant with a second child (we see her, for example, cleaning gunk from a sink, struggling to put on garter belt, stockings and boots).¹ Yet the film does not focus exclusively on women, though both Nelson and Wiley's experiences as young mothers helped shape it. (Nelson appears fleetingly with her young daughter Oona near the end.) Nelson herself has always eschewed the label "feminist," maintaining that in the case of Schmeerguntz she was simply working with what she had at hand.² Indeed, as will be clear, her work is "impossible to categorize either in gender or geographical terms."³ The films, all shot on 16mm, are strikingly different, but certain themes, attitudes and approaches modulate across them, and carry over, if in altered fashion, to the videos as well.

In Nelson's case, signature and translation acquire specific tonalities. Her films are intensely personal and at the same time abstract; many are surrealist; several include family members and/or Nelson herself; many incorporate animation and painting. All are carefully, if often barely perceptibly, structured around contrasts of color, rhythm, light, line, form and texture. That six of the twenty-four works that Nelson has "authored" are actually "co-authored" is thus not a problem to establishing "signature" in the sense either of authorship or of characteristic elements.⁴ Nelson's measured shaping of sounds and placement of silence provide, moreover, a third sense of "signature," one reminiscent of "time signature" and "key signature" in music. Equally important are Nelson's multiple engagements with translation. Among the several definitions listed in Webster's Dictionary that I find suggestive are: (as noun) "1a: a rendering from one language into another" and "1b: a change to a different substance, form, or appearance: conversion"; (as verb) "1a: to bear, remove, or change from one place, state, form or appearance to another. . . ," "2a: to turn into one's own or another language," "2b: to transfer or turn from one set of symbols into another," and "3: to enrapture."⁵ She engages all of these in her films.

Silencing Sounds/Sounding Silences

Many diverse modalities of signature and translation—and a crucial "resonance"—flow through Nelson's work, for in all her films and videos emotion and mood predominate, fueling, prompting and soliciting our reflections, ruminations and interactions. These are shaped through an unmooring of language and a probing of "signature" in the more musical sense, via a stress on aural textures, rhythms and voicing. Equally, her surrealist play with words, generic expectations and film conventions mirrors these stresses, as does her focus on silence.

Attention to the "silence" of sounds and the "sound" of silences shades all of Nelson's work. Already in Schmeerguntz, Nelson and Wiley devoted much care to editing the sound track. There, the rapid images find their equivalents in the staccato splicing of songs and snippets of recorded conversation and voice-over narration; there are no fades in or out. The visual/audial combinations are often ironic: a polka accompanies a photographic collage of priests dancing in circles in the snow; a male voice says, "And he kissed her again," as vomit pours (in reverse motion) back into a woman's mouth; "I Could Have Danced All Night" accompanies shots of a toilet being cleaned.

My Name Is Oona (US, 1969) explores memory, imagination, travel and translation. Again, sounds are key. Nelson's seven-year-old daughter, Oona, appears on horseback and/or...