Early Years In The Bay Area

The first programme opens with some of Gunvor Nelson’s most popular films, offering a glimpse into her prolific filmmaking in the Bay Area avant-garde scene of the 1960s. The programme begins in 1965, at the point when Nelson and longtime collaborator and friend Dorothy Wiley started their own journey as filmmakers with their debut Schmeerguntz, followed by Nelson’s Take Off. Both works are a tribute to the absurd, a humour that is both critical and comical, challenging and reflecting representations and roles of women in American society. Kirsa Nicholina is Nelson’s version of a birth film (a decade after Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving), showing with calm attentiveness the home birth of a couple she knew. The film opens with the expectant parents at Muir Beach, a place of personal significance since Nelson and her husband, filmmaker Robert Nelson, had built their own house there. Muir Beach and its visitors are the centre of the film with that title, which was commissioned by Bay Area television station KQED. Among the film materials discovered in Nelson’s flat were two 16mm silent Kodachrome prints of this work. The slightly shorter print was broadcast on TV and publicly screened for the first time in December 1969 at Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek, today known as Arsenal Filminstitut. These films not only present Nelson’s first – and remarkably successful – steps into filmmaking, but are also a testament to the collaborative spirit of the Bay Area’s creative community, especially the close circle of friends and artists around her: Dorothy and Bill Wiley, her husband Bob and their daughter Oona.

Julia Mettenleiter