In collaboration with Filmkoop Wien, we warmly invite you to “The Sound of Sweden”, an evening of experimental cinema that unfolds like a visual and sonic poem. The journey opens with My Name is Oona, Nelson’s final breakthrough on the American avant-garde scene, where Gunvor Nelson’s daughter recites the days of the week creating a loop engaging her name. The mood deepens with EMS No 1, an interplay of abstract sound and image challenging conventional film form. As the night progresses, How Pure is the Journey? invites you to experience the transformation of rituals into visual art. The experience finds its close with Light Years, which blends film with animation to evoke the rhythms of Sweden’s countryside. Curated by Andreas Bertman, Cosma Grosser and Markus Maicher.
Programme:
Works distributed by Filmform
MY NAME IS OONA
Gunvor Nelson
1969, 00:10:00
EMS nr 1
Ralph Lundsten
1966, 00:14:00
How Pure is The Journey?
Nadine Byrne
2012, 00:04:43
LIGHT YEARS
Gunvor Nelson
1987, 00:28:00
In collaboration with Filmform, we warmly invite you to “The Sound of Sweden”, an evening of experimental cinema that unfolds like a visual and sonic poem. The journey opens with My Name is Oona, Nelson’s final breakthrough on the American avant-garde scene, where Gunvor Nelson’s daughter recites the days of the week creating a loop engaging her name. The mood deepens with EMS No 1, an interplay of abstract sound and image challenging conventional film form. As the night progresses, How Pure is the Journey? invites you to experience the transformation of rituals into visual art. The experience finds its close with Light Years, which blends film with animation to evoke the rhythms of Sweden’s countryside.
Join us for an exploration where each film reveals its own perspective on time, sound, and image. Let’s celebrate an evening of Swedish experimental films. In presence of Andreas Bertman, producer and curator at Filmform.
Filmform (est. 1950) is dedicated to preservation, promotion and worldwide distribution of experimental film and video art. Constantly expanding, the distribution catalogue spans from 1924 to the present, including works by Sweden’s most prominent artists and filmmakers, available to rent for public screenings and exhibitions as well as for educational purposes. /Filmform
My Name is Oona was Nelson’s final breakthrough on the American avant-garde film scene. The sound consists of Nelson’s daughter, Oona, repeating the names of the days of the week and of her saying “my name is Oona”. The latter is edited into an expressive rythmical structure that accompanies the visual structure of the film that plunges into the experience of a child.
EMS No 1 is an abstract sound/image composition where sound and image were composed together, the first in an experimentation project at Swedish Television. The robot’s voice in the beginning of EMS nr 1 was recorded at the Swedish Transmission Laboratory at the Royal Institute of Technology. EMS nr 1 was included in a feature film, Psychadelica Blues, where the EMS-parts got to represent the psychadelic experiences. EMS nr 1 received the main award at the Art Biennial in Paris, 1967, The Swedish Film Institute’s Quality Prize 1966 and also about thirty international film awards.
How Pure is the Journey? continues Byrne’s cinematic work focusing on the different parts and functions of the ritual. In this film, the transformative act of the ritual is a short closing sequence, instead it is all the preparations leading up to this act that we witness. Two women perform a chain of actions; first, flowers, plants and vegetation are picked. These are then used to dye pieces of fabric. Further on the pieces of fabric are put together and sewn by hand into a larger piece of fabric. A ritual object has been created. But where does one draw the line for when the ritual begins or ends?
Light Years is the second film of Nelson’s remarkable series of collage films in which she is blending animation with live-action. Frame Line (1983) that was the first, evolved around Stockholm and Sweden, and with Light Years Nelson expanded into the Swedish countryside and landscape. The film is a long journey through landscapes and images, an ingenious road-movie in which Nelson encourages the viewer to look and to listen.
Furthermore, we would like to draw attention to “Schwedenbilder at the Austrian Filmmuseum” on April 16th-17th.
