Canyon Cinema co-presents Trace Elements: Remembering Gunvor Nelson, March 13, 2025

Posted February 26th, 2025 in Announcements, Co-Presentations, Events and Screenings, News / Events

Trace Elements: Remembering Gunvor Nelson
Thursday, March 13, 7:30pm
The Lab, San Francisco

Co-presented with San Francisco Cinematheque

Event tickets here

For Nelson, film is a plastic medium whose potential for personal expression demands a denial of conventional film language and syntax on the part of both the maker and the viewer. Her frequently ambiguous and haunting images arise from deeply intuitive personal responses to a subject or to a powerful feeling, and they often bear multilayered metaphorical and tactile meaning. Her complex and exacting montage strategies raise more questions than they answer, and often leave the viewer puzzled once outside of the film’s powerful aesthetic grip. […] [F]rom her first film Schmeerguntz (1966, co-made with Dorothy Wiley), […] Nelson has managed to transform her passion for the feel of pigments applied on flat surfaces to the paradoxically nonphysical interplay of shadow and light. Her films are sensual immersions into sound and image, where every flicker contributes, through its rhythm and texture, to the content of the composition. (Steve Anker: “The Films of Gunvor Nelson.” Published 2002 in Gunvor Nelson: Still Moving, John Sundholm, ed.)

Born 1931 in Kristinehamn, Sweden, artist Gunvor Nelson lived in northern California 1953–1993, during which time she pursued a painting and art-making practice and, in 1966, began filmmaking. In meticulous work created over the subsequent five decades, Nelson’s body of 16mm film (and later digital video) explores interiority and natural landscapes (in the Bay Area as well as in Sweden), presenting a lushly subjective worldview unequaled in the history of the medium. Following her January 2025 passing (at age 93), Cinematheque and Canyon Cinema celebrate the life of this master artist. (Steve Polta)

Screening Line-Up

Tree–Line (1998) by Gunvor Nelson; digital video, color, sound, 8 minutes. Exhibition file from Filmform.

Schmeerguntz (1966) by Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley; 16mm, color, sound, 15 minutes. Print from Canyon Cinema.

My Name is Oona (1969) by Gunvor Nelson; 16mm, color, sound, 10 minutes. Print from Canyon Cinema.

Time Being (1991) by Gunvor Nelson; 16mm, color, silent, 8 minutes. Print from Canyon Cinema.

Moons Pool (1973) by Gunvor Nelson; 16mm screened as digital video, color, sound, 15 minutes. Exhibition file from Filmform

Light Years (1987) by Gunvor Nelson; 16mm, color, 28 minutes. Print from Canyon Cinema.

TRT: 84 minutes

About Gunvor Nelson

Gunvor Nelson (née Grundel: b. July 28, 1931; d. January 6, 2025) grew up in Kristinehamn, Sweden. Her mother was a teacher and her father was the owner and editor-in-chief of the local newspaper, Kristinehamns-Posten. On leaving school she studied at the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, but moved to the US and California in 1953 to study art and art history. Nelson met her husband-to-be Robert Nelson when she was studying at the California School of Fine Arts (later known as the San Francisco Art Institute; SFAI). The Nelsons were a vital part of the new film culture that evolved in the San Francisco Bay Area and played a key role in the establishment of Canyon Cinema. Nelson subsequently taught filmmaking at SFAI 1970–1992, moving back to Kristinehamn in 1993. On her return Nelson quickly began working in digital video and was rediscovered in Swedish art circles, resulting in a number of awards and retrospectives both at home and abroad.