Date: 16 October 2002 | Season: Infinite Projection
COLLAGE FILMS OF GUNVOR NELSON
Wednesday 16 October 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
Gunvor Nelson’s collage work extends the artistic possibilities of animation and layered imagery, combining disparate elements into a temporal, cinematic painting. In this sequence of films from the 1980s, journeys through the Swedish landscape are used to depict a sense of displacement from her native country. By showing animation as a process, Nelson creates a unique and freewheeling chain of evocative transformations.
Gunvor Nelson, Light Years, Sweden, 1987, colour, sound, 28 min
Gunvor Nelson, Frame Line, Sweden, 1984, b/w, sound, 22 min
Gunvor Nelson, Light Years Expanding, Sweden, 1987, colour, sound, 25 min
This screening takes place in conjunction with a retrospective of Swedish avant-garde film presented by the Baltic Centre, Gateshead.
PROGRAMME NOTES
COLLAGE FILMS OF GUNVOR NELSON
Wednesday 16 October 2002, at 7:30pm
London The Photographers’ Gallery
Gunvor Nelson, Light Years, Sweden, 1987, colour, sound, 28 min
Gunvor Nelson, Frame Line, Sweden, 1984, b/w, sound, 22 min
Gunvor Nelson, Light Years Expanding, Sweden, 1987, colour, sound, 25 min
“Frame Line is a collage film in black and white. Glimpses (both visual and audible) of Stockholm, people, gestures, flags and the Swedish national anthem appear through drawings, paintings and cut-outs. It is a film with an eerie flow between the ugly and the beautiful about returning, about roots and also about reshaping. Light Years is a collage film and a journey through the Swedish landscape, traversing stellar distances in units of 5878 trillion miles. It is a film acutely in the present reflecting our temporal existence … continuous and imperfect.” (Gunvor Nelson, Canyon Cinema catalogue)
“Light Years continues to develop the concerns and techniques begun in her earlier film Frame Line. In Light Years Nelson blends collage animation with highly textured live-action material to create a haunting evocation of her displacement from her native Swedish culture. Particularly striking is her use of wet ink on glass to create a constantly shifting image of a path leading to a house. With these passages of the house and moving images of the Swedish landscape as threads, Light Years becomes a tapestry of change as experienced through constant motion. It is a personal reflection on the filmmaker’s memories of her past. The film is so filled with visual ideas that Gunvor Nelson has extended the film’s themes and techniques in her subsequent effort Light Years Expanding. All her recent films suggest that while the distance of time makes home further, the intensity of memory makes it richer.” (Parabola)
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