Black Sun Cinema: White Noise
A film programme curated by Florian Wüst
in association with Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, and Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, Berlin
Saturday September 22nd 2012, 19h
TDC, Triskel Arts Centre, Tobin St., Cork

Black Sun Cinema is partnering with Cork Film Centre this September 22nd to present a very special evening of experimental films from Berlin’s famous Arsenal archive. We are delighted to welcome Florian Wüst, Berlin-based artist and film curator, who programmed and will present this selection of works with the theme ‘White Noise’.

‘White Noise’ centres on legendary German underground film icons Wilhelm and Birgit Hein and gives Cork audiences the rare opportunity of seeing four of their films.

The programme as a whole reflects the deconstruction of cinema and television not only as a monolithic system of representation and a dream factory, but also as an instrument of corporate power and social control. Images of (human) disfigurement and the mysteries of childhood mix with the penetration of the senses on different levels. The combination of poetic collage, critical analysis, and radical abstraction intends to challenge the emotional as well as physical capacities of the audience. ‘White Noise’ also features works by internationally acclaimed artists and filmmakers: Thorsten Fleisch, Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, Sharon Lockhart, Gunvor Nelson, Richard Serra & Carlota Fay Schoolman, and Wolf Vostell.

Where possible, films in this programme will be projected from 16mm film prints.

Gunvor Nelson is a painter, photographer and master of personal film and video. A celebrated artist in her native Sweden, she pioneered personal filmmaking in California from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Fragment of a filmmaker's work: Gunvor Nelson
Tuesday, August 23rd, 14:45h, Room 3
Wednesday, August 24th, 15:00h, Room 4
Lussas - France

Lussas' Etats Généraux du Film Documentaire festival (August 21-27) presents a partial retrospective of Swedish filmmaker Gunvor Nelson. Curated by Federico Rossin, the retrospective covers the main themes of her work, from her seminal My name is Oona (1967), one of her earlier and most known works, the impressive and deeply personal Red Shift or her recent video-exploration True to Life.

Swedish-American artist Gunvor Nelson is among the most important experimental filmmakers of her generation. Shaped by the San Francisco Bay Area scene in the fifties and sixties, she has had an enormous influence on American avant-garde film since her debut in 1965. The basic subjects of her personal, dreamlike and tactile filmmaking are: childhood, memory, the idea of home/homeland and displacement, aging and death, the female body, the material beauty of natural forces. Gunvor Nelson is one of the few Swedish artists who have been honoured with a retrospective at MOMA in New York (2006).

Click the link to read am interview to Gunvor Nelson

MassArt Film Society: Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley
Wednesday, October 13th, 20h, 4$
Massachusetts College of Art, Film Department
Screening room 1. 621 Huntington Ave. Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA

- Schmeerguntz
By Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley.

"Schmeerguntz is one long raucous belch in the face of the American Home. A society which hides its animal functions beneath a shiny public surface deserves to have such films as Schmeerguntz shown everywhere - in every PTA, every Rotary Club, every club in the land. For it is brash enough, brazen enough and funny enough to purge the soul of every harried American married woman." - Ernest Callenbach, Film Quarterly

- Red Shift
Starring: Carin Grundel, Oona Nelson, Gunvor Nelson, Regine Grundel, Ulla Moberg, Gunnar Grundel. Assistant: Diane Kitchen
Red Shift is a film in black and white about relationships, generations and time. The subtitle is ALL EXPECTION. The movement of a luminous body toward and away from us can be found in its spectral lines. A shift toward red occurs with anybody that is self-luminous and receding. There is uncertainty about how much observable material exists.
"It involves Gunvor Nelson, her mother and her daughter. Carefully and with great tenderness, it focuses on these three women, trying to show us their relationship, succeeding with an emotional impact that is hardly ever found in such a subject. It is not the social context which is exploited but the little gestures, everyday events. Red Shift is a radical film; it sets new measures for avant-garde filmmaking dealing with personal problems." - Alf Bold, The Arsenal, Berlin

- Time Being
An animated film blending media (painting, stills, cut-outs and collected objects) that evokes images from the filmmaker's hometown of Kristinehamn, Sweden.