RPM Festival and the Brattle Theatre Co-Present Gunvor Nelson Call & Response: Echo

Post Screening Q&A with Sara Jordeno (Rhode Island School of Design), Sarah Keller (UMass-Boston), Shira Segal (MIT), and Wenhua Shi (RPM Festival)

RPM Festival and the Brattle Theatre co-present a special screening program Gunvor Nelson: Call & Response: echo (The second part of this series), honoring one of the highly acclaimed Avard Garde filmmakers Gunvor Nelson. This program features a total of five films from different decades of her long lasting career. Curated by Sarah Keller, Sara Jordeno, Shira Segal and Wenhua Shi.

Moon’s Pool | 1973 | 15 minutes | Color | SOUND

Fog Pumas  | with Dorothy Wiley | 1967-68 | 25 minutes | B&W | SOUND

New Evidence | 2006 | 22 minutes | COLOR | SOUND

Snowdrift | 2001 | 9 minutes | Color | SOUND

Field study #2 | 1988 | 8 minutes | COLOR | SOUND | 16mm

Please visit revolutionsperminutefest.org for more information.

GUNVOR NELSON (1931–2025) was a prominent figure in American and Swedish avant-garde cinema. Born in Sweden, she studied painting before relocating to California in 1953, where she became involved in the Canyon Cinema collective, encountering filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Chris Strand, and Bruce Baillie. Nelson’s deeply personal yet shockingly universal films embody extensive experimentation—including animation, stop-motion, scratching, or painting on film, lens inventions, sound manipulation, and exploration of interiors, framing, and nature –processes that served to explore her experiences related to family and identity, her life as an expatriate, and the cycle of birth and death. She also influenced generations of filmmakers through her teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute (1970–1992).

Returning permanently to Sweden in 1992, Nelson embraced digital video and received renewed recognition in the Swedish art world.

Revolutions per Minute Festival (RPM Fest) is dedicated to short-form poetic, personal, experimental film, essay film, animation, documentary, video and audiovisual performance, and is co-hosted by Art and Art History Department and Cinema Studies at UMass-Boston, Brattle Theatre in Cambridge & Harvard FAS CAMLab.

Brattle Passes Accepted