Saturday, March 28, 2026 at 7:30 PM
Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
"Light Years Expanding Year 1988 Country Sweden Runtime 25 min. 16mm Color Light Years Expanding is a further elaboration of Light Years, Gunvor Nelson’s journey into the Swedish landscape in which she blends animation with live-action. Whereas movement was one of the prime characteristics of Light Years, Light Years Expanding revolves more around the image-work, foreshadowing her last and most complicated collage film Natural Features.—Professor John Sundholm, Stockholm University Director: Gunvor Nelson. Screening 2 of 4 Old Digs Year 1993 Country Sweden Language English Runtime 20 min. 16mm Color “I was enormously impressed and bowled over by the beauty and artistry. It is one of the few films that I have ever seen that gave me the same feeling that I get when I see painting that I really respond to on a gut/heart level. The images are very powerful. The poetry and the subtlety of the content too. The editing/rhythms all seemed perfect. The sound track kept disappearing from consciousness (exactly right), but never stopped working with the pictures. Masterpiece.”—filmmaker Robert Nelson Director: Gunvor Nelson. Screening 3 of 4 Field Study #2 Year 1988 Country Sweden Runtime 8 min. 16mm Color Field Study #2 develops further Nelson’s painterly animation aesthetics. This time the imagery is not created by a recording camera after which they are reworked, but instead the images and sounds appear out of their own world. The soundtrack consists of animal sounds and a serious male voice reciting names of animals in Latin. It is a hilarious work that makes fun of the educational film and our expectations upon the film screen to constitute a window to an outer world. Field Study #2 urges one to look and listen while emphasizing the comic and absurd, the latter a trait that runs through so much of Gunvor Nelson’s filmmaking and which was the impetus for her to start filming with Dorothy Wiley in the ’60s. The film ends with a thank you to Dorothy Wiley.—Professor John Sundholm, Stockholm University Director: Gunvor Nelson. Screening 4 of 4 Natural Features Year 1990 Country Sweden Language English Runtime 28 min. 16mm Color “In Natural Features, Gunvor Nelson mingles hundreds of still images with 3-D objects and ‘real’ images photographed through glass layerings into a free-associative and playfully bizarre form of animation. Perhaps no film has more successfully blended an evident passion for painting with a sensitivity to filmmaking such as lush pigments alternate with and punctuate the different photographic layerings.”—curator Steve Anker Director: Gunvor Nelson."