The Material and the Mimetic: On Gunvor Nelson's Personal Filmmaking
Author(s): John Sundholm
Source: Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media , FALL 2007, Vol. 48, No. 2 (FALL
2007), pp. 165-173
Published by: Drake Stutesman; Wayne State University Press
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The Material and the
Mimetic: On Gunvor
Nelson's Personal
Filmmaking
John Sundholm
Experimental or avant-garde film is a tricky notion. In North America,
"avant-garde" is the more common term of the two because film as a practice
is primarily marked by a manifestly commercial culture. Non-profit, minor,
and inexpensively produced film is itself a phenomenon of the avant-garde in
a climate that is strictly capitalist.1 In Europe, where hardly any feature films
aimed for regular distribution are produced without public funding (that is,
partly non-commercial), the oppositions between different economies of pro-
duction are not as polarized.
I am, however, convinced that we have these imprecise and restricting
notions of avant-garde or experimental because film as a field of study ha
such a short history. The emerging digital culture of the moving image that is
blending formats, media and practices of exhibition will soon make the notion
of "film" obsolete. Nonetheless, the dominant form, i.e., narrative feature film,
has become-and has been-the metonymical figure for film as an economy
(movies), social form (film) and aesthetic language (cinema). What the recen
changes in formats, media, and exhibition will imply for those products and
practices that David James has termed "minor cinemas"2 is that, when taken
together, "minor" cinematic forms will turn out to be "major" in terms of out-
put and availability, due to digital technology and the Internet. The change is
nevertheless not radically new. In 1958, Pontus Hultén, the up-and-coming
versatile director of Stockholm's Museum of Contemporary Art (one of the
leading European art museums of the 1960s), pointed this out in a catalogu
for Viking Eggeling's work:
Framework 48, No. 2, Fall 2007, pp. 165-173.
Copyright © 2007 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309.
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Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 48.2
In a couple of years probably no one will talk about film as they are doing now.
The concept of film will disappear. Film will be used in the same way as the
printed word. The simple fact that the moving image is projected by an optic-
mechanical apparatus will be no more of a common denominator than that all
printed letters are printed in a printing press. There will be as many kinds of
film as there are novels, newspapers, brochures, secret reports, essays and
poems. And every kind will be considered as something separate in itself.3
According to Holly Willis in New Digital Cinema : Reinventing the Moving
Image (2005), we have finally reached what Hultén predicted. Willis describes
the current state of things as:
... a resurgence of interest in large-scale film and video installations in galleries
and museums as film and video converge; an increasing use of live video sam-
pling tools in club events; a renewed independent film movement featuring
narrative experimentation, low-budget modes of production and, on occasion,
a focus on overtly personal or political issues; a reinvestigation of the goals and
projects of the classical avant-garde; the advent of 'digital graffiti'; and a grow-
ing media-based culture not beholden to the constraints either of the narrative
form, nor even of the movie theatre.4
I have called the new situation (in another context) "thè non-place of cin-
ema," stressing the way film as a concept has changed, merging with an
expansive and hybrid moving image culture.5 However, let me emphasize
again that the current state is not really new. Hultén envisioned the change
because of his experiences in the kinetic art scene in 1950s Paris. Tom Gun-
ning, who has promoted the concept of "a cinema of attractions," has sug-
gested that film was, from the beginning, a hybrid and heterogeneous form;6
and Willis carefully points out that what we are experiencing is a "reinven-
tion." Peter Weibel, on the other hand, has stressed how the lack of knowl-
edge of the history of experimental film among art critics has led them to
"exaggerate contemporary achievements" in what is called video art today.7
Covering some forty years of this long transition in both media use and
technological equipment, Gunvor Nelson's work is another test case for ques-
tions about this change. It so challenges cinema studies that it prompts us to
ask how to categorize, label or describe such films. Nelson's production is not
so unconventional that it is beyond any boundaries, but her integrity has con-
fronted established structures and her work has often been displaced to the
periphery as a result. Surprisingly, she is not that well known inside the small-
ish culture of the American avant-garde film tradition. This is peculiar since,
as Michael Zryd states, the avant-garde/experimental film culture in North
America regularly recycles the films and filmmakers of the '60s and '70s,8
turning this cinema into an institution with a distinct canon and teleologica!
history. Although gender prejudice and Nelson's own policy regarding exhi-
bition (film is film and should therefore be projected in proper theaters) are
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The Material and the Mimetic
part of the explanation of the ignorance of her work, this is not enough to eas-
ily explain her occlusion.
Four areas of Nelson's work should be considered. Two are related to
inherent characteristics affecting experimental film culture-gender and distri-
bution/exhibition. Two others-authorial formalism and an overly simplified
historiography-concern academic practices regarding the moving image.
They may be considered as reasons for the neglect of Nelson's work. Thus,
one of the key qualities that her work foregrounds is the way her films and
videos bring these insufficiencies forward.
The first is the question of authority, or "auteurism," and how Nelson's
approach may be said to transform that category. It is a prime link between
gender and authorship. In an interview, Nelson's own comments are illumi-
nating:
Everyone seemed unsure of what to call it. It is difficult. Are you really so
"avant-garde"? Experimental films sounds like something incomplete. I have
made both surrealistic and expressionistic films, but I prefer the term "personal
film". That is what it is about. Even if many don't understand the meaning of
the term. On the other hand, it can be easier to refer to them as avant-garde
films. But I like the description "personal film" since it stems from one person.
When you paint, the term you choose will be described by method; mural
painter for instance and so on. But when it comes to film we lack [the capacity]
to describe what we are really doing.9
Of course, Nelson's oeuvre has a few generalized characteristics. Such
films as SchmeerguntzfiJS, 1966) and Fog Pumas (US, 1967), both co-made with
Dorothy Wiley, are clearly part of the tradition of underground filmmaking.
Schmeerguntz is a hilarious critique of the officially sanctioned image of the
American woman and housewife, which provoked critic Ernest Callenbach
to write that the film "is one long raucous belch in the face of the American
home [...]. A society which hides its animal functions beneath a shiny pub-
lic surface deserves to have such films shown everywhere-in every PTA,
every Rotary Glub, every garden club in the land."10 Fog Pumas, in turn, is an
ironic, satirical commentary on the conventions of experimental filmmaking
(and especially that of Surrealism). In another category are the films specifi-
cally about Nelson's family. My Name is Oona (US, 1969) is the most famous
one. Two more-Red Shift (US, 1984) and Time Being (US, 1991)-complete an
astonishing trilogy of generations. I have difficulty finding another example
from film history where different stages in life, of being a child, mother and
grandmother, or that of birth, maturity and death, are depicted in such
uncompromising detail.
Finally, the partly animated collage films can be grouped together: Frame
Line (US, 1983), Light Years (US, 1987) and Field Study #2 (US, 1988); works
that are, according to Steve Anker, outstanding in the experimental field but
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Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 48.2
extremely difficult for the occasional viewer.11 The exclusivity of the collage
films lies in the modernistic method used: the films are constructed of
imagery through which Nelson employs the full moving image language:
mixing animation, documentary footage, photography, painting and sound
and, in so doing, creating a new amalgam of expression. Despite their radical
nature, these films have common cinematic traits: a constantly moving cam-
era, a rhythm directed by editing and a metonymical use of the single frame
or picture. This is a complete aesthetics of the moving image where all cine-
matic means are used, an aesthetics that Nelson continued to use when she
moved to a new format- video-with the making of Tree-Line in 1998. Only
Snowdrift (US, 2001) shows characteristics of conventional video art where, as
Gene Youngblood describes it, "the image as object" is constituted.12 But
here, too, Nelson's work expands the art: Snowdrift demonstrates ways that
video may permit a greater elaboration of aesthetics and mood through
sound. This is another salient trait: her use of sound. Nelson has always been
a distinguished sound artist but digital production has enabled her to have
even more control (and more time) to work with the soundscape.
Nelson's production is also characterized by a depiction of women's
experiences and of what it means to be a woman. Her renditions are reveal-
ing, sensual, erotic, critical and realistic but never overt, didactic or simplistic.
The beginning of this strand is feminist in a very direct sense. The harsh cri-
tique of a 1960s ideal of femininity offered in Schmeerguntz later transforms
into sensitive, moving images of woman as miracle (the birth film Kirsa
Nicholina, , US, 1969), as object ( Take Off US, 1972), and as existential beine
{Moons Pool, US, 1973).
But there is a more profound aesthetics. Nelson's attitude brings an old
idea to the fore: that of the mimetic. By this I mean mimesis not in accordance
with the unproductive, tiresome juxtaposition of content versus form but as
that which can never be conceptualized or clearly articulated. Yet it can be
captured (especially in an audiovisual medium like film) and is therefore not
beyond articulation. Such a view of the mimetic constitutes what I call an
ethics of materiality, a respect for the object and for the aesthetic material
employed, and for the material and the things that surround us. This mimetic
attitude is very close to the notion of mimesis for which Adorno argued in his
Aesthetic Theory (1970). While Adorno is difficult to quote, I refer to a summary
by Hauke Brunkhorst, which aptly points to Adorno's core arguments:
[Mimesis] means an attitude to one's natural and social environment and to
other people and other things that does not compel this otherness to be under
one's own will. Mimesis in the sense Adorno is using the word here means to
do 'justice' to the otherness of the other, and to react adequately to the latter's
own aptitudes and concerns. 'False projection' conversely means the projection
of an image that does not fit with the otherness of the other, one's own egocen-
tric image of the world. False projection makes everything its own image.13
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The Material and the Mimetic
The American experimental film canon is basically male territory; its
artists and interpreters are mostly men. Of course, it is no coincidence that
the avant-garde mode of film production, the artisanal and authorial, coheres
well with the stereotypic male ideal of extroversion and control-of personal
domination. Nelson, who is well known for her uncompromising attitude
toward screening conditions and print quality, does not, on the other hand,
dominate and control what she is filming. In short, she doesn't impose a
vision or a worldview on someone or on an object. Nor does Nelson make
films that carry imprints of a single authorial voice. She does not create a
"Nelson style." What characterizes her work is the absence of all such false
projections, something distinctively obvious in Kirsa Nicholina and Take Off
The former is a straightforward film of a home birth, an event that Nelson
found so overwhelming that she could do nothing but record what was hap-
pening (Nelson had never planned to shoot the film; someone else was sup-
posed to make it). She even chose to keep a flaw in the lightning caused by
the lab. And in a film like Take Off where Nelson uses animation techniques
to deconstruct the (presumed male) image of a woman's body, there is a ten-
derness and esteem for the body "object." The rather plump and aged strip-
per is given full respect for her performance and professionalism. Nelson
articulates this openness and consideration in a rare written piece about film-
making. In a handout for an editing class, she states:
However, surprising solutions can be had with the most "deficient" of material
if you let it speak to you; if you learn what really is in the film. Patiently, you
should familiarize yourself with every frame, overlooking no flaw or detail. At
this stage it is essential to look for what is actually there-as opposed to the pre-
conceived, romantic idea of what you would like it to be.14
Nelson is one of those exceptional filmmakers whose aim is not to judge
or belittle, although some of her works are clearly political, for example,
Schmeerguntz and Take Off regarding images of women; Frame Line on Sweden,
Stockholm and Swedishness; and Red Shifi on the politics of family relation-
ships, especially that between a mother and daughter. likewise, the thought-
fulness that characterizes Nelson's work is content-oriented. My Name is Oona,
a film which is strikingly beautiful in its depiction of a child's world where
fantasy and reality merge in the same phenomenological space, has a grim
side as well-Nelson also focuses on what is frightening to a child. This discor-
dance extends to the soundtrack: the repetitious sound that starts as a way of
discovering the joy of rhythm and resonance, of ordinary music, develops
into expressions of the authoritarian function of language. Nelson includes
the sound of her daughter Oona's efforts to learn the order of the days of the
week, guided by adults. In Red Shiff on the other hand-a film that is some-
thing of a tribute to Nelson's family and to family life in general-the repeti-
tive and common conflicts that are part of everyday family life and that can
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Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 48.2
hardly ever be solved are given extensive time and space. The film features
Nelson's own family and Nelson's "playing" out of different roles that repre-
sent a family: mother, daughter, grandmother, father and grandfather. The
film merges two diegetic times. It is staged both in a present and in a past, a
fact only shown by the opening titles. Conflicts and contradictions are truth-
fill. Clashes are portrayed for what they are. At the same time, Nelson invites
the viewer to experience them in their amalgamation of beauty, distress and
complexity.
Nelson's resolute attitude toward projection and exhibition is one of the
standard anecdotes in the experimental/avant-garde film world. This also has
to do with her relation to the authorial question. Her films are personal in that
they stem from her. She knows exactly how they should look and sound.
Hence, when it comes to copying and printing, a film is not sent anony-
mously to a lab. Each copy is the result of an individual lab process. It is a
unique object with its own individual relation to the negative. Film is prima-
rily a very fragile, singular and, hence, aural medium for Nelson; thus her
work brilliantly counters Walter Benjamin's thesis that film as a medium is
without an origin, hence lacking an aura and open to endless reproduction.
Her attitude makes sense when one watches her films attentively in a
good theater. Nelson's particularity even makes the projector part of the
event. It is very difficult to imagine how the soft blueness and glittering con-
trasts in Moons Pool could be transferred into another format or what the expe-
rience would be like if the graininess and luster of Red Shift were faded due to
poor projection. The movements between a black, dark screen and glimpses
of light and color that are so characteristic of many of Nelson's works-rang-
ing from Fog Pumas to Tree-Line-demand projection where the only available
light is from the projector, immersing the viewer in a dark, transcendent
space.
Despite these authorial imprints and interventions, Nelson is not an
author in the sense that she is creating a coherent body of films that could be
summed up as belonging to one homogenous style. It would be a misleading
shortcut to interpret Nelson's as an all-inclusive force reducible to "essence."
She is far too considerate and explorative a filmmaker to be caught in any
preconceived idea. This approach is one of the great qualities in her work: a
truthfulness that never leads to a false projection. Nelson's object is never
deprived of its enigmatic character or given a simple identity or meaning
Consequently, I am not surprised that one of Nelson's latest works is called
True to Life (2006). Even the highly constructed collage films like Frame Line ,
Light Years and Field Study #2 show a love for raw material: objects, land-
scapes, lines and colors. For example, we see a brush in action, but the hand
is omitted in order to focus on the material processing of the image and not
on the person behind it.
The so-called realistic or documentary stance and culture of the moving
image has been much criticized during the last decades, not least because the
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The Material and the Mimetic
rise of new digital media has blown away the innocence of indexical ideol-
ogy. However, one of the great values in film as a medium is that it enables
the filmmaker to speak through the material, upholding the things, sounds
and movements which already surround us.15 The material value of film was
something that Siegfried Kracauer already drew attention to in his plea for an
aesthetic of realism in Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (I960).
For Kracauer, the nature of the medium was revealed in the direct and sen-
sual depictions of "railway noises" in Brief Encounter (David Lean, UK, 1945)
or the streets in Umberto D (Vittorio De Sica, IT, 1952) that led "a life of their
own."16 Very often this has been interpreted as naïve realism, as a call for an
aesthetic of the image, of seeing through the image out into the world. But
Kracauer's remark may also be viewed as a plea for a materialistic sensuality;
the railway noises and the street are, in his examples, beyond representation
and narrative, beyond sign and signified, and constitute therefore a pure sen-
sual and material experience. One of the original potentials in film (and the
moving image) is that the medium allowed one to experience the world in all
its material freshness. This is particularly true of Nelson's work, as every film
and video by her is based on a genuinely new experience of the material
world, not only of the objects as such but also of the feelings, temper and
qualities that the surroundings embody. Hence, the importance of Nelson's
production in the current culture is the way that she uses a medium that still
has the capacity to preserve otherness. She creates highly personal films that
draw attention to our surroundings without imposing her subjectivity or will
on either viewer or object. This aesthetics of particularity, of a respect for the
momentary, is a challenge to any academic practice. It challenges historiog-
raphy of experimental film as well, forcing the scholarship of minor cinemas
to create heterogeneous "minor histories."
A history of experimental film lends itself to what Michel Foucault has
called "general history." In The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), Foucault makes
a distinction between "total" and "general history." The former reduces
everything (all phenomena) to a central core whereas general history
"deploy[s] the space of a dispersion."17 Thus, an appropriate historiography-
a general history-must include all components: producers, products, prac-
tices, conceptions and conduct. It should not reduce those relations. We
should not have an "experimental film" or "the Gunvor Nelson film;" rather,
we should take in the relations, connections and interplay wherein this work
resides. Therefore it is worth bearing in mind Michel de Certeau's words
regarding history (although my point here concerns all meaning-making
practices): "History thus vacillates between two poles. On the one hand it
refers to a practice, hence to a reality; on the other, it is a closed discourse, a
text that organizes and concludes a mode of intelligibility."18 Thus, if to study
Gunvor Nelson's production it has to be closed and reorganized according to
a logic of signs and signifiers, then its most vital characteristic must be in its
ethics of otherness.
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Framework: The Journal of Cinema & Media 48.2
John Sundholm is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Karlstad University and Reader
in Cultural Analysis at Âbo Akademi University, Finland, He is director of the
research project "The History of Swedish Experimental Film" (2006-2008) and has
published work in English on experimental cinema in journals such as Studies in
European Cinema (Bristol: Intellect) andNew Cinemas: Journal of Contempo-
rary Film (Intellect). Recent books: editor o/Gunvor Nelson and the Avant-Garde
(Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003); co-editor (/Memory Work (Peter Lang,
2005); co-editor o/Collective Traumas: Memories of War and Conflict in 20th-
century Europe (Brussels: PIE-Peter Lang, 2007). A version of "The Material and
the Mimetic: on Gunvor Nelson's Personal Filmmaking" appeared m Evidence, the
catalogue for Gunvor Nelson's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York,
in 2006.
Notes
1 Paul Arthur: "a mesh ot semi-stable funding sources, hxed channels ot distribu-
tion and exhibition, and organs of publicity, along with material exigencies (e.g.
budgetary and technological considerations) and shared elements of production
(e.g., subfeature length, unscripted, made by single individuals or two-person
collaborations, predominantly in 16 mm non-sync sound, and so on)." Paul
Arthur, '"I Just Pass my Hands over the Surface of Things': On and Off Screen,
Circa 2003," in John Sundholm, ed., Gunvor Nelson and the Avant- Garde (Frank-
furt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003), 75-76.
2 David James, The Most Typical Avant- Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas
in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
3 Pontus Hultén, Inledning, Apropâ Eggeltng (Stockholm: Moderna Museet,
1958), 7 (my translation). The Eggeling exhibition consisted mainly of a series of
film screenings that actually constituted the grand opening of the museum.
Hultén later had plans to let Peter Kubelka curate and establish a film collection
at the museum. The task was realized for Centres Pompidou in Paris when Hultén
became its director.
4 Holly Willis, New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image (London: Wall-
flower Press, 2005), 3-4.
5 John Sundholm, Contemporary Cinematic Work from Finland: The Non-Place
of Cinema and Identity," in New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 4, no. 2
(2006): 83-92.
6 Tom Gunning, The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the
Avant- Garde," in Thomas Elsaesser, ed., Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative
(London: BFI, 1990).
7 Peter Weibel, Expanded Cinema, Video and Virtual Environments, m Jenrey
Shaw and Peter Weibel, eds., Future Cinema: the Cinematic Imaginary after Film
(Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press), 120.
8 Michael Zryd: The Academy and the Avant-Garde: A Relationship of Depend-
ence and Resistance", Cinema Journal 45 no. 2 (2006): 17-42.
9 Interview by Anders Pettersson published in Gunvor Nelson and the Avant- Garde,
ed. Sundholm, 147.
10 Quoted by Steve Anker, "The Films of Gunvor Nelson," in Still Moving: I Ljud och
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The Material and the Mimetic
bild, ed. John Sundholm (Karlstad: Karlstad University Press, 2002), 11. Callen-
bach's review was originally published in Film Quarterly no. 1 (1971).
11 Anker, 18-22.
12 Gene Youngblood, Cinema and the Code, in bhaw and Weibel, eds., Future
Cinema, 157. Originally published in a supplemental issue of Leonardo, Journal of
the International Society for the Arts , Sciences and Technology (Oxford: Pergamon
Press, 1989).
13 Hauke Brunkhorst, Adorno and Critical Theory (Cardiff: University of Wales Press,
1999), 62.
14 Gunvor Nelson, handout for editing class.
15 This stance does not oppose the so-called structuralist film tradition. While this
tradition (at least in the UK) aimed not to attack "realism" per se , it opposed the
dominant film culture's attempt to transcend the image, to make a disappearance
of the means so that the world would appear. The means were understood to be
the material in a broad sense-film stock, format, the apparatus, exhibition prac-
tices and so on-but also the material and aesthetic qualities of the image. This
version of structuralism is very evident in Malcolm Le Grice's early works ( Little
Dog for Roger , UK, 1967; Yes No Maybe Maybe Not, UK, 1967; Berlin Horse , UK,
1970), which largely consist of found footage, a genre that through re-use points
to the material in a twofold way. It draws aesthetic attention to both the object
depicted and the means of recording it. Even such a hardcore structuralist film as
Peter Gidal's Room Film 1973 (UK, 1973) plays on this twofold relation: being
both a deconstruction of narrative film/representation and an experience of
color, duration and composition. Thus, Nicky Hamlyn is right to make a distinc-
tion between Stan Brakhage's transformative aesthetics and those of Gidal, when
he claims that "Gidal accepts that other things are going on in his films apart
from what he is attempting to control." (Nicky Hamlyn, Film Art Phenomena [Lon-
don: BFI, 2003], 95). Hence, when the structuralists acknowledged an expanded
conception of the material, they also partly acknowledged an embracing of film's
realist quality.
16 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969; rpt London: Routledge,
1989), 10. The best description of such a general history is Mitchell Dean's: "such
a history seeks series, divisions, differences of temporality and level, form of con-
tinuity and mutation, particular types of transition events, possible relations and
so on. [ . . . ] [0]ne which specifies its own terrain, the series it constitutes, and
the relations between them." Mitchell Dean, Critical and Effective Histories: Fou-
cault 's Methods and Historical Sociohgy (Routledge: London 1994), 93-94.
17 Michel De Certeau, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press,
1988), 21.
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