Towards A New Collage Aesthetic

The last programme consists of a selection of Gunvor Nelson’s collage films, work that emerged out of her use of the facilities at the Stockholm Film Workshop and its animation stand. It also suggested a return to her beginnings in visual arts in the 1950s. Here, images appear from a world of their own in which they may be reworked and reassembled endlessly, creating new ideas, reflections and emotions. Frame Line is the first collage film. Its working title was Glimtar (Glimpses) and it is a reflection on both Stockholm and Sweden. The native country that she returns to and observes is a place that is both familiar and distant, both beautiful and strange. The film begins with images of Stockholm, after which Nelson begins assembling her collected material into new visual work, discovering what the camera has captured in order to reassemble the material. Light Years is the second film in the collage series. Nelson moves into the Swedish countryside and the film is a long journey through landscapes and images, an ingenious road movie. Field Study #2 constitutes a further development of Nelson’s painterly animation aesthetics. Although some of the imagery is directly recorded, the effect is that of images and sounds appearing from a world of their own. On the soundtrack we hear the sound of animals while a serious male voice recites their names in Latin. Nelson makes fun of educational films and of our expectations of the screen to constitute a window to the world. Field Study #2 urges us to look and listen while emphasising the comic and absurd, a trait that runs through Nelson’s filmmaking and which was the impetus for her to start filming with Dorothy Wiley in the 1960s. The film ends with a thank you to Wiley.

John Sundholm