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<\/a>Renowned for their exuberance and inventive cinematic wit, Robert Nelson\u2019s films established him as a leading member of the West Coast avant-garde and post-Beat culture of the \u201860s and \u201870s. \u00a0These two programs of different works pair recently restored prints of best-known films with rarer works to provide a new perspective on the artist\u2019s output and influence. \u00a0Films like The Great Blondino<\/em> (1967), which features an anachronistically attired man navigating inspired setups, and Hauling Toto Big <\/em>(1997), a sprawling opus of dream states and transformed verit\u00e9, are presented alongside Nelson\u2019s inventive collaborations with artists and musicians, including artists William T. Wiley and William Allan, and the Grateful Dead.<\/p>\n ROBERT NELSON<\/strong> (1930\u20132012, San Francisco, CA) studied painting at San Francisco State University and the California School of Fine Arts, where he was introduced to a circle of Bay Area artists that converged into the California Funk Art movement of the 1960s. Nelson taught at various institutions, including the San Francisco Art Institute, Sacramento State and CalArts, before landing a teaching job at UW Milwaukee in 1979 until his retirement in the mid-1990s. He then retreated in self-imposed isolation to a remote house in the mountains of Northern California, returning to painting and photography. \u00a0Nelson has influenced a number of major filmmakers, such as Peter Hutton, Fred Worden, and Curt McDowell. He was the main force in co-founding the independent distribution company Canyon Cinema in 1966, hiring his former student Edith Kramer (later the head of the Pacific Film Archive) as its first director. He died in January 2012.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n PROGRAM DETAILS: <\/strong><\/p>\n Program 1,\u00a0September 20, 6:00 pm<\/strong><\/p>\n The Great Blondino Preview <\/em>(1967, 16mm, color, sound, 3min.) Hot Leatherette <\/em>(1967, 16mm, b\/w, sound, 4min.) The Off-Handed Jape<\/em> (with William T. Wiley, 1967, 16mm, color, sound, 9min.) Penny Bright and Jimmy Witherspoon <\/em>(1967, 16mm, color, sound, 3min.) Grateful Dead<\/em> (1967, 16mm, color, sound, 9min.) The Awful Backlash<\/em> (with William Allan, 1967, 16mm, b\/w, sound, 13min.) The Great Blondino<\/em> (with William T. Wiley, 1967, 16mm, b\/w & color, 43min.) —<\/p>\n Program 2, September 22, 12;30 pm<\/strong><\/p>\n Alternative Strategies 1: Handmade Home<\/em> (Marcy Saude, 2012, HD video, 5min.) Deep Westurn <\/em>(1974, 16mm, b\/w & color, sound, 4min.) Special Warning <\/em>(1998, 16mm, b\/w & color, sound, 5.5min.) Bleu Shut<\/em> (1970, 16mm, b\/w & color, sound, 33min.) Hauling Toto Big<\/em> (1997, 16mm, b\/w, sound 42min.) September 20, 6:00 pm September 22, 12:30 pm Introduced by curators Lori Felker and Mark Toscano! Renowned for their exuberance and inventive cinematic wit, Robert Nelson\u2019s films established him as a leading member of the West Coast avant-garde and post-Beat culture of the \u201860s and \u201870s. \u00a0These two programs of different works pair recently restored […]<\/p>\n
\nA rarely seen trailer for Nelson and Wiley\u2019s 1967 epic.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cA kinetic film sketch designed to involve the viewers muscles. The rocky seaside cliffs near Stinson Beach, California, hold the wrecked carcass of a #52 pickup that is a rusting monument to Hot Leatherette.\u201d (Robert Nelson)<\/p>\n
\nStarring Dr. Otis Bird and Butch Babad.
\n\u201cThis film can be of immeasurable aid to would-be actors who are weak in the jape.\u201d (William T. Wiley)<\/p>\n
\nSound by Robert Nelson, featuring Oona Nelson
\n\u201cThis film is a hypnotic yet unsettling take on the \u201c\u201860s looping craze\u201d (R.N.), made using a homemade camera-printer and a 1\/4\u201d tape deck. Nelson pits minimal, repetitive imagery against a looping recording of his daughter Oona, which goes gradually from sweet to curious to mysterious to cacophonous as the loops begin to overlap each other. Since its initial premiere alongside The Great Blondino and other shorts in April 1967, the film has rarely been seen. Today, it stands out as a quite unique, more textural piece from the filmmaker, which, rather than retreating into pure abstraction or bland trippiness, subtly and diffusely transmits an undercurrent of its ominous source material.\u201d (Mark Toscano)<\/p>\n
\nMade in collaboration with the Grateful Dead, Nelson\u2019s prize-winning short features a montage of ever-escalating peaks set to a collage of the band\u2019s first album.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cWhat at first seems to be one of Nelson\u2019s most minimal films, even flirting with burgeoning notions of structuralism, is actually quite rich and distilled, particularly from a narrative standpoint.\u201d \u00a0(Mark Toscano)<\/p>\n
\n\u201cShooting in 1966 without script, story, or any narrative preconception, Nelson and Wiley created a masterwork of \u201860s independent cinema. The Great Blondino follows an anachronistically attired young fellow as he navigates a beguiling, sometimes troubling world with a curiosity that opens us wide to the filmmakers\u2019 inspired, freeform vision. In many ways, the wonder of Blondino may echo the excitement of invention and exploration that Nelson and Wiley experienced in the making of the film. Utterly exuberant and freed from rote cinematic restriction, it embodies an artistic rigor and direction that also prevents it from ever seeming too unhinged. An incredible feat of tightrope walking.\u201d (Mark Toscano)<\/p>\n
\nA brief documentary about the house built by Robert Nelson and William T. Wiley in the forests of Mendocino County, California.<\/p>\n
\nStarring Robert Nelson, William T. Wiley, William Geis, and Mike Henderson.
\n\u201cA \u2018film wake\u2019. Though celebratory in mood, it has a mournful subtext… death and dying. We dedicated it to Dr. Sam West, departed friend and patron of the arts, trusting that his ghost would approve our hijinx and seeming irreverence.\u201d (Robert Nelson)<\/p>\n
\n\u201cSpecial Warning is like a poem more than a narrative or story. It suggests states of isolation, barrenness, sexual guilt and sin, but even these punishing afflictions can have a humorous aspect when accompanied by horns.\u201d (Robert Nelson)<\/p>\n
\nStarring Robert Nelson, William T. Wiley, and Diane Nelson. Music by Blue Crumb Truck.
\n\u201cEven when we know the game is an illusion, the experience of Bleu Shut is entirely a pleasure: the \u2018game\u2019 is fun, the Nelson\/Wiley debates, infectiously funny; and Nelson\u2019s choice of imagery, quirky and amusing. Bleu Shut reveals, and allows us to enjoy, our gullibility within the pervasive absurdity of modern life.\u201d (Scott MacDonald)<\/p>\n
\n\u201cIn the mid 1990s, Nelson started assembling this film from a large stack of b\/w footage he had kept from sketches, unfinished projects, class assignments, outtakes, and other assorted remnants, informed by jazz music, poetry, and the I Ching in its construction. A dense and ecstatic work of fragmented narratives, dream states, chaos and serenity, verit\u00e9 footage rendered into poetry, this epic work is in many ways a culmination of Nelson\u2019s cinematic interests. A winner of the Grand Prize at the 1998 Ann Arbor Film Festival, Hauling Toto Big has been too rarely screened.\u201d (Mark Toscano)
\n\u201cThe experience of being immersed in watching Hauling Toto Big seems to encapsulate the intangible, elusive nature of the filmmaker\u2019s artistic quest. Robert Nelson\u2019s films appear to me as a voyage of discovery: not only of what the material and conditions of cinema are capable of, but also for truths about life itself. Inevitably linked to the cultural environment in which they were made, they amount to a unique and personal journey through America\u2019s post-psychedelic subconscious.\u201d (Mark Webber)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"