"Not Evident When You First See the Object": An Interview with Gunvor Nelson

This interview took place on October 24, 2006 in New York City during the Museum of Modern Art's retrospective of Nelson's work.

Drake Stutesman: You famously have gone from using film to using video. When did you do that and what are the pluses and minuses of this transfer?

Gunvor Nelson: My films are in 16mm. In Sweden, and probably here too, there are very few 16mm projectors left. Many institutions don't maintain their projectors and don't have people who can run them well. Even at established places. Film's so vulnerable to scraps and dirt and damages to sprocket holes. The beginning of Red Shift [US, 1984] was ruined recently. We saw it jump all over the place. The film is showing next in Chicago and I don't know if it's going to go through the projector. I wonder what film I should replace it with. Not long ago I showed a film at the Swedish Film Institute and they ruined it. It goes on and on.

DS: You have negatives of all these films?

GN: My originals are stored at Pacific Film Archive. I'd like to have prints made from the original negative of Red Shift, which is falling apart and needs to be mended. It was at Palmer Labs, which doesn't exist anymore, and the film has to be placed at another lab. There you have to go through the whole process of timing again. Timing is the term for going through every scene and correcting the density of lights and darks and the color. It's easier with a black and white film like Red Shift. This is all costly plus the costs of making trial prints. The Pacific Film Archive has made an inter-negative and they use this negative for archival purposes. So that is my situation; I can't make any more prints unless I spend a lot of money and time. At this point I'm very tired of my 16mm films. Because I want them shown I'm dragging my heavy old films around, when I actually want to be at work making new videos. I don't have much grasp of the computer but I can use certain programs for video quite well. The very best thing about video is that it is so much fun and that I can do the whole process myself in the computer, from filming to editing to manipulating the image to the final product. No labs are needed. It's so much easier than film when the computer behaves. Of course both image and sound can go wrong in all kinds of ways. One is during transfers, but video does not get the same kind of scrapes and damages; in certain ways it is not as vulnerable as film.

DS: When did you make that transfer to video?

GN: At first I went to the Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm for a special course in video. I was by far the oldest one and I had never done video.

DS: When was this?

GN: In '98. There was not enough good equipment and people were fighting for time on the equipment. You had to sit at night to edit and this was difficult for me so I went to another workshop and there I more or less taught myself. The workshop had new equipment so things didn't break down so often.

DS: Are there any losses in using video? Is there anything you wish you could retain from film when using video?

GN: Not, it seems, if you have a good camera, a good lens, and good projection. You saw the difference in Before Need [US, 1976] and True to Life [US, 2006] [shown at MoMA the night before]. It's not that much difference. If you get the projector to have the right ratios of blacks so that you get a distance in the visuals, so that the blacks are black and the whites are white and they have a nice range of colors in...