fun and games for everyone. the cinema of robert nelson

In the single-take film The Awful Backlash, artist William Allam’s hands untangle a fishing line, after which he winds it back onto the reel. The analogy with the projector suggests a durational experience. The Off-Handed Jape repeats the illusion of sound synchrony: the supposed interactions between painter William T. Wiley and Nelson with their mime characters are set in different times and spaces. Oh Dem Watermelons, a parody of racist stereotypes, follows fifteen watermelons as they are abused through the streets of the Mission and Potrero Hill districts. Steve Reich marked the pulse and harmony by recording the choruses of two minstrel show songs with the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Following his technique of phase-shift tape loops, in Penny Bright and Jimmy Witherspoon Nelson superimposed cacophonous recordings of an invented game played with his daughter, alongside TV images captured with his camera-printer. In Limitations, he filmed his Milwaukee students with two opposing cameras 180 degrees apart, in simultaneous views of up to four layers, while Deep Westurn is a group portrait of filmmaker Mike Henderson, sculptor William Geus, Wiley, and Nelson, repeatedly falling off their chairs up to fifteen times. Punishment is satirized in Special Warning, a poem about isolation and sexual guilt. In Hot Leatherette, where Nelson uses single frames and found footage, a pickup truck is driven off a cliff at Stinson Beach. Bleu Shut gives contestants eleven chances to guess the name of a ship within one minute. Their conversations apparently match the photographs, followed by a second minute of “found objects”. A name-like transparent clock embedded in the screen parodies metric cinema.

( Francisco Algarín Navarro )

Curated and introduced by Francisco Algarín Navarro. Many thanks to Canyon Cinema for providing the analogue prints of this program. Images courtesy of the artist and Canyon Cinema Foundation.

Organizing his suite through eight trajectories or “movements”, Robert Nelson portrays California as an intricate crossroads where geological, historical, political and ecological strata intertwine with the filmmaker’s intimate memory of the territory. In the first part (the negative pole of Suite California: immigration, climatic suffocation, industrial cinema), near the Mexican border, a dynamic cast—a bullfighter and a group of tennis players mysteriously interacting in “gringo-lingo” Spanish—shoots (and parodies) a suspense film. The fractured prologue, a whirlwind of clapperboards, unfolds into recomposed scenes. The premise: successive attempts by a group of Hispanics to cross the border end in a plane crash. Majestic topo-cartographic tracking landscape shots across Death Valley highways leave fiction behind, driving toward Hollywood. Nelson combines a visit to Will Rogers’ estate/mausoleum with bustling views of Hollywood Boulevard. An Edison film on orange pickers is followed by the suffocating pollution of Los Angeles seen from the Hollywood Hills. Central California in the second part delineates the positive pole. Early views of Cliff House and Sutro Baths, panoramic shots of present-day San Francisco, the Deer Hunt and excursions to the Sierra Nevada, together with Nelson’s family history—his father’s role in the construction of the Golden Gate, the compilation of home movies from Christmas celebrations, and the photographic album-collage—, compose the Edenic counterpoint to the first half. Every landmark depends on the gaze inscribed within them.

( Francisco Algarín Navarro )

Curated and introduced by Francisco Algarín Navarro. Many thanks to Canyon Cinema for providing the analogue prints of this program. Images courtesy of the artist and Canyon Cinema Foundation.

A painting by William T. Wiley of Charles Blondin, the French funambulist who, starting in 1859, repeatedly crossed the Niagara Falls on a high wire (blindfolded, pushing a wheelbarrow, cooking an omelette), was the serendipitous inspiration for The Great Blondino. Nelson and Wiley’s Baudelairean epic (a cross between the episodic picaresque novel and Beat poetry) follows the wanderings of the misfit acrobat through the pop landscape of the Bay Area, induced by the literal logic of dreams (orgies and stripteases) blended with the hallucinatory visions of a perpetual waking state (hippos drinking milk, a question mark floating above his head). Nelson uses distorted lenses, time-lapse, solarization, and a range of trompe-l’oeil effects to portray Blondino’s multiple falls and rebirths, always transcending death. In Half-Open & Lumpy, the found footage playfully accompanies an accelerated song by the children’s band the Tweedy Brothers, while Hauling Toto Big, Nelson’s last film, is a compendium of black-and-white footage, unfinished projects, and earlier films (More, Tiger Stymie, He Sees Blind Horses and Bad Poetry, Limitations) structured in four movements according to the hexagrams of the I Ching, jazz, and poetry. In dense, ecstatic multilayers, the central section of this magnum opus recreates Robert W. Service’s macabre song-poem The Cremation of Sam McGee, where a gold explorer dies frozen during an expedition in the Yukon. In his cremation, he joyfully comes back to life, feeling warmth for the first time since leaving home.

( Francisco Algarín Navarro )

Curated and introduced by Francisco Algarín Navarro. Many thanks to Oona Nelson and Mark Toscano, as well as Canyon Cinema and the Academy Film Archive for providing the analogue prints of this program. Images courtesy of the artist and Canyon Cinema Foundation.