Returning To Sweden: Mothers And Daughters

Red Shift and Time Being are two of Gunvor Nelson’s many films exploring her family and her relationship with her daughter Oona. These intimate bonds oscillate between moments of bliss and grief. Red Shift is the only film by Nelson based on a narrative script and it also received a theatrical release in Sweden. Its working title was Mother-Daughter Film and it is a painful, yet tender work about family relationships drifting apart. It describes the enforced change when one’s only child leaves the family home and one’s mother is about to exit life altogether, leaving one entirely alone. Both of Nelson’s parents and her daughter perform in the film, representing different generations. The narrative unfolds in alternating close-ups and long-shots establishing a psychological and emotionally charged space, which is both universal and particular at the same time. Throughout the candid and considerate narrative, former Pacific Film Archive director Edith Kramer reads excerpts from the book Calamity Jane’s Letters to Her Daughter, adding another dimension to the amalgamation of conflicting emotions. In Time Being Nelson’s mother is on the threshold of passing. The film is a commemoration, in four sequences, of her mother’s life. It starts and ends with lengthy black leader, like a message of condolence. After a prologue of remembering her mother as the strong woman she once had been, there follows a series of three shots, each beginning in static takes of her mother lying in a hospital bed. The first sequence of her mother transforms slowly into a beautiful but distressing depiction of her mother dying and how the bond between them is severed. For each new shot registering the brutal fact in front of the camera, the distance from the mother increases and the camera moves closer towards Nelson, to finally focus on her own feet.

John Sundholm