by Ruairí McCann
Gunvor Nelson’s Moons Pool (1973) flows into being as a dualistic organism that presents, moves and thinks in a tactile and speculative fashion. From beneath the sound and sights of rushing waves, and close-ups of Nelson, unadorned and then made up like a clown, rises an eddying undercurrent of philosophical and poetic intonations. Uttered by a feminine voice, gnomic phrases such as ‘many stars on my face but only two eyes’ and ponderings like ‘I don’t know why we are given these bodies to care for anyway.’ reverberate, repeat and agglutinate as Nelson moves to intercutting shots of a woman in the bath. From her first-person perspective, we see the water lapping her legs, her stomach and her vulva.
This merging of the aquatic, the corporeal and the cerebral, the fluidity and graspable nature of sea foam, skin and a person’s self-conception is indicative of a body of work that probes, to borrow from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the inextricably intellectual and sensual nature of perception. This experience of being and thinking as a body in the world is intimately tied, coloured and made more complex when it comes into contact, whether in conflict, communion or both, with the mind and body of others— along with the host of different identities that one person inhabits. Nelson enacts these relations, generally speaking, through a pointedly constructed formalism, where sequences of images are arrayed against detailed soundscapes. Her films seem at once innermost, emerging from the first person—yet are also deeply preoccupied with the life of the mind and bodies of others, including and especially her family, and with a penetratingly playful and theatrical approach.
All of these elements and tendencies were apparent at last year’s Cork International Film Festival, where the late filmmaker’s work was shown across two programs curated by aemi, an Irish artist film and moving image curatorial and support organisation, and Filmform, a long-running archive and distributor of Swedish experimental film which handles Nelson’s work, among many others. The first program featured Moons Pool in concert with two other films, Shadowland (2015) by John Skoog and Landskap (1987) by Claes Söderquist.
All three artists are linked not only by the broad facts of having occupied a transcontinental terrain, as Swedish artists who have spent significant time and made work in the United States, or by their distribution through Filmform. More substantially, there is the shared preoccupation with landscape, marked by a contrasting array of approaches and visions. In Moons Pool, the fluid yet sensual harmony and counterpoint of water, light, image and touch becomes a remarkable representation of the multi-fangled nature of the human sensorium. It was followed by Shadowland and its pointedly political whistle stop of the American west as the site and then stage for the colonialist plundering of the peoples of Turtle Island and the East. The program culminated in Landskap, a methodical and materialist exercise in merging the rhythmic and spatial dimensions of nature with those of the cinematic apparatus. Though it may lack the conceptual and formal ingenuity and force of Michael Snow’s landscape work, from which it draws heavily, the film finds its own language in its subtle manipulation of the dynamics of its sound design. In one moment, a hushed, dense and wide open recording of the film’s setting, a forest and its interlacing of streams and rivers, suddenly shrinks down to a crystal clear and close-up recording of a babbling brook. It’s a powerful evocation of an environment that is typically considered hazy, voiceless and unknowable, the world without people, embodied and detailed, ironically, by the mechanised progeny of the anthropocene, the camera and microphone.
The second program was comprised entirely of films by Nelson, namely, My Name is Oona (1969), Red Shift (1984) and Time Being (1991), tethered by the thematic throughlines of age and family, the wisdom of youth and the vitality that persists even even in a person’s ‘declining years’. The origin point of My Name is Oona was in a workshop led by the composer Steve Reich.* A family friend, Reich had previously worked with Gunvor’s then husband, the filmmaker Robert Nelson, as part of the avant-garde San Francisco Mime Troupe which developed into collaborations on two of Robert Nelson’s earliest films, Plastic Haircut (1963) and Oh Dem Watermelons (1965). At this workshop, he recorded the Nelsons’ young daughter Oona saying her name and listing the days of the week. Nelson took these recordings and, working with musician and producer, Patrick Gleeson, expanded on them, crafted a dizzying sonic composition against which she then began to film, rephotograph and cut scenes of her daughter in various states of play.
Reich in the mid to the late 60s, with tape pieces such as It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out as well as compositions with traditional instrumentation and live performance such as Piano Phase, was experimenting with compositional ‘phasing’ where the same short ‘phrase’ is played by two or more instruments simultaneously and over and over but at differing and shifting tempos, causing what could start as a relatively straightforward musical idea to gradually transform into something more complex and possibly transcendent. In the first part of the film, the recording of Oona declaring her name is looped and treated with delay effects by Nelson and Gleeson, until it builds into a propulsive march. Against this epic wall of sound, we see Oona in various scenes and states of being and play. Nelson overlays a swirling shot of trees and undergrowth with an extreme close-up of Oona, making her appear like some sort of forest god, earthen and magisterial. We also get a more quotidian glimpse at her life, when she wrestles half naked with a friend. Suddenly, she is back to being a child, with a direct, physical and intuitive relationship to others and the world around her.
This opening chant gives way to the film’s midsection, a bridge dominated by the aforementioned ‘days of the week’ recording. It is a moment of pause and tension, as it goes from only featuring Oona’s voice, unaltered and altered, to the addition of Reich’s. He brings to bear an intrusive, paternalistic presence as we hear him directing her how to speak into the mic with a hint of impatience. This cloud of condescension however is quickly dispelled and we return to a more energetic, open and feminine world. Nelson returns to scenes of Oona and the chanting of her name, but with a change in tune.
In the first part of the film, Oona’s delivery is flat and staccato, a line delivery that has been carefully modulated, and so Nelson and Glesson’s resulting composition is similarly lockstep. In this final part of the film, Oona doesn’t merely say her name but sings it, in two different, equally melodic forms, both presumably spontaneous and of her own invention. Nelson overlays these joyful roundelays and applies a similar phasing technique and rhythm, but the result is a collage of more variegated textures and a deeper sense of space, immersing the film in a more expansive atmosphere and range of possibility than that engendered by the more mechanical, minimalist opening. Against this sound of Oona’s imagination running wild, unhindered and then propelled to cosmic heights, Nelson depicts her daughter in a jubilant, youthful fantasy, wearing a cape and riding a pony against the dawn. She has transformed into a princess, a force as luminous and spasmodic as the sun which bathes and frames her. Although a lullaby sung by her mother, in her mother tongue of Swedish, acts to ground this fantasy, completing a mythic portrait with a humble, nurturing embroider.
This exaltation of Oona, as a corporeal being and the queen of her own make-believe world, and the admixture of baring the film’s sonic seams and Gunvor’s own voice, points towards a celebration of childhood tinged with the melancholic awareness that comes with growing older. Most children are more receptive to their own enormous imaginative and creative abilities than many adults, and so cycle through or simultaneously hold views of themselves, their bodies, other people and the world around them, relatively unfettered. When a child plays, they can occupy different states of being and identities simultaneously, instinctively and speculatively, as they are less contained by the strictures of capitalist, adult world and its ironclad notions of normative behaviour. There is also a differing experience of time, with a general lack of awareness that life will eventually draw to a close. As one gets older, and the weight of time and the knowledge of its inevitable outcome bears down harder, one’s grasp of the world can become more measured and less manifold.
Red Shift portrays this awareness and the life of a family by dovetailing and cutting between two different time periods, ‘the past’ and ‘the present’, in a chamber drama of small gestures, love and family’s long-burnishing affections and resentments, and role swapping. With Nelson herself, the now young adult Oona and Gunvor’s own mother, Carin Grundel playing the shifting roles of daughter and mother.
A scene where an exasperated Oona, as the daughter, teaches Gunvor, as the mother, how to mount a horse is charged with all the friction, tension and affection that define many close mother and daughter relationships and which Nelson homes in on throughout the film. She stages these intimate and complex relationships largely in a series of fleeting private encounters between the characters. Tête-à-têtes of exchanged glances, words, caresses, deflections and conflicts between the characters which are mundane and yet rife with personal history, the amassed anxieties, dreams, aspirations and regrets which grow and circulate among families.
Many of the scenes, when not in extreme close-up, are blocked with the camera peering at the characters through doors and windows with ample awareness that a world of detail is occurring just off-screen. This proscenium-like staging codes the film’s domestic setting as theatrical, with daughterhood and motherhood as parts, played separately, simultaneously and with time, distance and experience shaping their motivations and contours. And so daughters who become mothers don’t shed their identity as daughters, as one experience varyingly enlightens and shadows the other.
This conscious role playing and generational disjunctures and parallels permeate the soundtrack too. We hear a string of old-fashioned turns of phrase such as ‘never drive a black hog at night.’ These pearls of wisdom are folk poetry, authored by no one in particular and breathed in and out like air. And yet take on significance with age, communally when they begin to disappear from the common parlance and personally when associated with a particular older relative, like a mother. They become in memory, verbal heirlooms, the auditory equivalent of the jewellery which Gunvor handles in the film with care and caution.
Nelson interlaces these aphorisms with longer prose passages, read out from the letters of the ‘Wild West’ icon, Calamity Jane. Although framed as private correspondence addressed to her daughter, they read like a bareknuckle and yet sensationalised performance of a tell-all autobiography. In a deeper sense, they are a concerted act of revision, carefully orchestrated by a woman who survived, against the odds, in a cutthroat, male-dominated world and who spent many years acting out a heavily abridged and exaggerated rendition of her life on the stage. In other words, she was very conscious of public perception, its fickleness and cruelty, and adamant about maintaining a shielded self. So even to her own daughter, the real Martha Jane Canary can never truly be revealed. By including this particular narrative, Nelson is speaking to a wider truth, that even blood and intimacy can’t fully fuse two different people. There will always be secrets and, as summed in recurring shots of Gunvor’s and Carin’s hands held side by side and their lack or abundance of wrinkles; gulfs in experience.
The last film of the programme, Time Being (1991) is in stark contrast from much of Nelson’s work. Instead of having an intricate soundtrack, the film runs in total silence, and while much of her other films find their form primarily on the Steenbeck through her precise cuts and rhythms, this painfully intimate film was made entirely in-camera and in a single shot.
It is an observation of Nelson’s mother in her dying days. This former gymnast, seen in moments of joy, play, anger, lust and in vivifying detail in Red Shift, now lies emaciated in an atrophying state of consciousness. Seen at first in extreme closeup, Carin is framed against a shock white, overexposed background, gazing off-screen with her mouth agape and breathing wan.
The silence is out of respect for the dead but also to serve a gaze that is unbroken with a purpose. The process of death is so often obfuscated, if not elided, in cinema and in life. Nelson’s former student, Lynne Sachs, in a 2025 tribute published by Millennium Film Journal, put it most astutely: she wants us to see dying as “a verb, it is alive, it is part of the cycle of life.” The act itself should not be treated as something inconceivable or taboo, but should be confronted and accepted. Nelson is determined, for herself and by extension, us, to gaze so intently that she forgoes, arguably, her art’s most essential expression, the cut, a remarkable and moving sacrifice.
Instead she pulls back and expands the space of the shot, simply by walking back in increments. She does a total of three times, and each time it happens awkwardly. Her hands tremble so the shot careens as if the earth is shaking. It marks out that there is a body behind the camera, belonging to a daughter filming and submerging herself in her mother’s last gasps, and so it registers as an acknowledgement of the pain of this passing, which finds expression physically and cinematically, in the rattling of the frame.
The pronounced awareness that there is a person behind the camera also reminds us that even though Carin has reached an extremis, the end, she is not alone. This is reinforced again when pulling back reveals that she is in a hospital ward and shares a room with another person. Dying then is not just an integral process of being alive, it is also a communal act.
*I haven’t found any confirmation of this, but presumably the workshop included a rendition of his tape piece, My Name Is (1967).
Ruairí McCann is an Irish writer, curator, illustrator and musician from Belfast and County Sligo. He has contributed to various publications, such as photogénie, aemi online, Screen Slate, Documentary Magazine, Film Hub NI and Sight & Sound.
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