Name: Fog Pumas
Genre: Short
Duration: 23 min
Rating: 7

I saw a selection of short works by experimental filmmaker Gunvor Nelson, often made in collaboration with Dorothy Wiley. Nelson is generally regarded as a "feminist" filmmaker and I understand why. However, my favorite pieces were the most enigmatic.

The program began with "Schmeerguntz", a montage contrasting footage of 1960s American beauty pageants with visceral original footage documenting the, shall we say, detritus of pregnancy. While amusing, the work's meaning was so pointed that it could have lasted one minute instead of fifteen and sacrificed none of its ideological punch. "Patriarchy replaces the reality of womanhood with a sanitized image to please the male gaze!"

I can see why the inclusion of such confrontationally frank footage of the bodily experience of pregnancy was empowering and self-assertive for the artists. And sadly, the message of the film still resonates in our society. But I find it difficult to be overly impressed with a work that I feel I have intellectually consumed within the first few frames.

Somewhat more interesting, though hardly subtle, was "Moon's Pool". Nelson films her own and a male body writhing under water, the two bodies seeming to merge, and the gender of the fragmented body parts becoming harder and harder to determine. Some of the footage is hauntingly beautiful, and seems a portrait of the water as much as the bodies. Binaries overcome!

The harder Nelson's work became to pin down, the more I was drawn to it. "My Name is Oona" features footage of the filmmaker's 9 year old daughter riding a horse through the terrain of Marin County. On the soundtrack the titular statement is looped ad nauseam. Is this a celebration of the coming into being of a young person's subjectivity, or is the almost punishing repetitiveness of the self-naming a commentary on the discipling of a consciousness into a subject-hood that society can call upon and thereby control?

My favorite piece was "Fog Pumas", the longest and most mysterious of the evening. It seems to be a kind of surreal family drama, the primary members of which are adult dwarves and children about the same size as the adults. They play with each other in Golden Gate Park, the footage of which brought back plenty of fond memories for me. This idyll seems to horrify a "normal sized" matriarch. Throughout, a truly impressive psychedelic jam is heard on the soundtrack. I had no idea what it was about nor did I care. I enjoyed the hell out of it.

The short form refers to creative works characterized by their brevity and concise storytelling. Unlike full-length feature films, short films have a running time of less than 45 minutes, while TV shorts have a running time of less than 22 minutes.

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Fog Pumas

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