Four films by Gunvor Nelson

"I discovered how beautiful things look through the camera... A melon or dirty dishes, seen with a lens in close-up were translated into something else... The camera became like binoculars; you zero in on a small area and isolate it, and it becomes more precious because it's selected." (Holmlund, 78)

This DVD includes the following films

Schmeerguntz (1966) 15 min.
By Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley.

"SCHMEERGUNTZ is one long raucous belch in the face of the American Home. A society which hides its animal functions beneath a shiny public surface deserves to have such films as SCHMEERGUNTZ shown everywhere - in every PTA, every Rotary Club, every club in the land. For it is brash enough, brazen enough and funny enough to purge the soul of every harried American married woman." - Ernest Callenbach, Film Quarterly

My Name is Oona (1969) 10 min.

"But the revelation of the program is Gunvor Nelson, true poetess of the visual cinema. MY NAME IS OONA captures in haunting, intensely lyrical images fragments of the coming to consciousness of a child girl. A series of extremely brief flashes of her moving through night-lit space or woods in sensuous negative, separated by rapid fades into blackness, burst upon us like a fairy-tale princess, with a late sun only partially outlining her and the animal in silvery filigree against the encroaching darkness; one of the most perfect recent examples of poetic cinema. Throughout the entire film, the girl, compulsively and as if in awe, repeats her name, until it becomes a magic incantation of self-realization." - Amos Vogel, The Village Voice

"It is one of the first filmic masterpieces of the new wave films." - Larry Jordan

Take Off (1972) 10 min.
Starring Ellion Ness.

A dance, a documentary, a metaphysical strip tease.

"Ellion Ness, a thoroughly professional stripper, goes through her paces, bares her body, and then, astonishingly and literally, transcends it. While the film makes a forceful political statement on the image of woman and the true meaning of stripping, the intergalactic transcendence of its ending locates it firmly within the mainstream of joyous humanism and stubborn optimism." - B. Ruby Rich, Chicago Art Institute

Moons Pool (1973) 15 min.

"A masterful and lyrical use of the film medium to portray the search for identity and resolution of self. Photographed under water, live bodies are intercut with natural landscapes creating powerful mood changes and images surfaced from the unconscious." - Freude Bartlett

Publisher: ReVoir

Preview: https://vimeo.com/123619166