My Name is Oona
(Gunvor Grundel Nelson; 1969)
Far less critical of gender roles than her other work (that which I've seen at any rate), Gunvor Nelson's My Name is Oona emerged as one of the loveliest works in American cinema of the late 1960s (a time when you could use such terms as 'poetic' and 'cinema' in the same sentence and still maintain a straight face), and remains so to this minute. In writing about this film Amos Vogel judged Nelson 'the true poetess of visual cinema'; and while that may or may not be true . . . Vogel's declaration is too sweeping even for me, much as I incline towards it . . . no film of hers is at once so dazzling in form or effortless in its lyricism. And like all such films, it could not have been made in a time other than its own.
Friday, March 16, 2007
Oona
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2 comments:
Wow. A real gem.
And the Steve Reich-credited soundtrack is perfect.
I had always wanted to see this film. The girl depicted is Gunvor Nelson's daughter, who is now quite an accomplished multimedia artist herself. So Thank You. I also like Nelson's film Take Off very much.
I was one of Oona Nelson's students at Ohio State University, and she was amazing in her ability to take 'Sheltered Midwestern Kids' and make them see Yoko Ono or Cindy Sherman in the same vernacular as Evel Knievel or John Belushi....she taught a lot about the structure of medium, that everything is medium and quality is not obejective....
Good Stuff.
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