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Bob Nelson: An Alt-Filmmaker Passes by Doniphan Blair
"I did a number of portraits of Bob," noted photographer Jack Fulton. 'He would come up and say, 'I need another portrait.' I took one shot, painted the negative and took a photo of that and then printed it backwards." photo: J. Fulton
"It was kind of incredible that he would come out here," noted Dick Blau, a University of Wisconsin Milwaukee professor, about Bob Nelson who pioneered art film in San Francisco in the 1960s and built the UW-Milwaukee film department from 1978 to 1992.
"That kind of wildly imaginative, intuitively driven and outrageous humorous spirit that he brought to his work became part of our DNA. He influenced a lot students, gave them access to their intuitive power."
"Nelson brought spontaneity, teasing and wit to the often deadly serious arena of avant-garde moviemaking," quipped photographer and filmmaker Bruce Weber in his NY Times obituary.
“The artists I knew at that time felt pretty genuinely that if the process got too heavy or ponderous or worried, if you weren’t having a good time at least part of the time, something was wrong,” Nelson was quoted as saying.
"But he was also a formalist, so there was a kind of rigor there," Blau added. "He was a really good worker [Nelson also did welding and construction]. We started from nothing. He would bring in handwritten books filled with a lot of practical things but also Zen Koans and I Ching readings [Buddhism and Taoism were a life-long Nelson study]."
"He resonated with a certain kind of California personality, very smart and kind of zany. He would take conventional ideas and give them a spin, both as an artist and teacher. He was completely accessible, like a true democrat. Our [film] program got on the top 25 list [of film schools in America], according to the Hollywood Reporter. That was because of Bob."
Bob Nelson died at 81 from cancer on January 9th at his home, a tiny cabin in Laytonville, in the heart of Northern California's Emerald Triangle. Born in 1930 in San Francisco to Swedish immigrants, he studied painting in the 1950s at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) when it was still the California Institute of Art and full of fascinating folk, from Korean War veterans to beatniks and world-class teachers, like the painters Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff.
Bob Nelson at work on 'Oh Dem Watermelons' circa 1964. photo: courtesy B. Nelson
Upon graduation, Nelson had a couple of shows and became active in the local art scene, befriending other artists, like the painters William Allan and William T. Wiley, who became his prime cinema collaborator.
He switched mediums after borrowing a camera, shooting his first film and teaching himself. The Art Institute had no film department at the time—indeed, Nelson built that one too. He also co-founded Canyon Cinema with Bruce Baillie.
“I had 2,000 feet of film... and it looked very poor... repetitious and long," he said referring to his first film. "I struggled with the footage for weeks. No matter what I did, it seemed boring. In desperation, I started cutting the shots shorter and shorter and... had my first real revelation about cutting,” he told Scott MacDonald in “A Critical Cinema”.
The result, “Plastic Haircut” (1963, 15 min), flits through a panoply of images: a wizard, a nude woman (a Nelson favorite), a pyramid with an all-seeing eye. Wiley assisted, Ronnie Davis, founder of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, acted and Steve Reich, the now famous minimalist composer, did the track.
Hooked on acetate, Nelson upped the ante with “Oh Dem Watermelons” (1965, 12 min), a Kodachrome sendup of that racist stereotype, which turned out to be his most popular piece. After a long structuralist shot of its hero upright in a field like a football, it leaps into all sorts of adventures, including being splattered and smushed to Reich's repetitive score which referenced Stephen Foster.
The climax comes literally when a woman makes love to Mr. Melon (graphic but not pornographic) while another melon (using pixilation) chases a crowd up a stairs and across a bridge into an orgasm of hyper cutting. Intended to be part of a Mime Troupe performance addressing racism, “A Minstrel Show, or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel,” it soon stood alone and became a festival hit.
Nelson, left, and Wiley, right, filming 'The Great Blondino'. photo: J. Fulton
Little film festivals were sprouting up all over, due in large part to the new wave of San Francisco art filmmakers. In addition to Nelson, there was Jordan Belson, Bruce Connor, Bruce Bailey, Lawrence Jordan, George Kuchar and his wife, Gunvor Nelson.
Nelson applied advanced watermeloning to “Grateful Dead” (1967-8) a mashup of the lauded lads' first album, replete with sped-up music, Jerry Garcia fingering close-ups, Pig Pen quadruple exposures, solarized images and the band canoeing—the canoe sinks with them in it—the standards tropes of Hollywood acid sequences and music television spots ever since. He remained friends with bassist Phil Lesh.
Around this time, Nelson married Swedish immigrant Gunvor Grundel, who also went to SFAI and switched from painting to film before he did. Ironically, she also began collaborating with a Wiley, albeit his wife Dorothy, starting with "Schmeerguntz", (1965, 15 min). The two couples paired up by gender, Wiley told me, and taught themselves film.
Nelson nee Grundel would go on to teach film at SFAI (including this author) into the 1990s, when she returned to Sweden. She has been hailed as one of its finest filmmakers, including by the likes of Igmar Bergman.
Nelson would eventually marry four times. He already had a son, Steve, with a previous wife, and would have another, Miles, by the third. With Gunvor, he had a daughter, Oona, now a respected San Francisco pilates master, who was the subject of her mother's acclaimed short, "My Name is Oona" (1967, 11 min).
"We did a lot of stuff as families," recalled photographer Jack Fulton who befriended Nelson at the Art Institute around 1965. "Bob was kind of leader. He was nine years older and had done a lot more living. He was an expert on life, you could say, and a very funny guy, a droll guy. [My wife] Diane and I think he was the funniest person—just had a great personality. The wonderful thing was we liked one another and we supported one another."
Nelson shooting the blindfolded wheelbarrow pushing tightrope walker for 'The Great Blondino'. photo: J. Fulton
"I worked on a couple of films with him and was the location scout for 'The Great Blondino'," continued Fulton, who rented a room for some years to his son Steve, a talented jazz drummer. Ostensibly about a 19th-century tightrope walker, "The Great Blondino" (1967, 46 min) was Nelson's first epic.
"I still see it as a seminal film of the underground film structure that was built up in the 1960's," Fulton the photographer recalled. "Though funky and humorous, the whole idea of 'getting to the other side' as represented by Blondino is, or was, as important to me as the 'Epic of Gilgamesh', a man is searching for big answers. It didn't have the angst of Becket. It was [more] trusting of the self and not fearful."
"One day, Bob stopped by and said, 'It would be nice to do a film but what should we do it about?" Bill Wiley recalled. "I said, 'How about basing it on the Great Blondin here?'" Wiley had done a painting from a lithograph of a 19th century tightrope walker, blindfolded and wheeling a wheelbarrow, he found in an old National Geographic.
"I said, 'This is kind of like the artist, pursuing this unknowable thing.' That was the metaphor."
Wiley helped with the shooting, his wife Dorothy made the odd grey costumes, based on a Ronnie Davis performance of Becket; his brother Chuck Wiley played Blondino (Nelson added the "o" so they wouldn't have problems with the Blondin heirs) and the poet Lou Welch played the antagonist.
Along with enacting Blondin's story and Wiley's painting, which appears in the film, "The Great Blondino" featured numerous nudes, snippets of Hollywood films (a la Bruce Connor), and a smorgasbord of other imagery, including a rhinoceros.
"In the corner of the painting was a post card of a rhinoceros," Wiley told me. "Nelson took a huge chair into the San Francisco Zoo—unannounced—and Blondino watches this rhino pace back and forth. Things echo from the painting into the film, the idea of the artist going through his trails and tribulations, his fantasies, his sexual fantasies."
"His nudes were a generational thing," noted Michael Walsh, when I remarked on their frequency. Walsh was a student of Nelson's in Milwaukee who headed out to San Francisco because "When [Nelson] hit someone, he hit them good."
"He certainly appreciated the female figure. He told me that nudity was a shameful thing when he was growing up but in art school it was safe," Walsh explained. "It dated him a little. In the early '90s, there was the strong PC [political correctness] and feminist culture and some people didn't like his work. But some of his heaviest admirers were feminists, like Diane Kitchen [a filmmaker who taught at SFAI and now is at UW]."
"When 'The Great Blondino' came out, we went to the Fillmore—Bob knew Bill Graham," Fulton continued. "I showed my slides and Bob showed 'The Great Blondino'. We did the first multimedia show at the Fillmore—although we couldn't get the guy with the opque projector to stop projecting colored water on top of us."
"We were going to do a similar extravaganza in the No Name Bar in Sausalito. But when we plugged everything in, we blew out all the lights on main street. [Nelson] also pushed a car off a cliff at Muir Beach and filmed it."
Nelson at the back of his studio in the University of Wisconsin, where he taught for 14 years. photo: M. Walsh
"His films knocked my socks off especially 'The Great Blondino'," noted Walsh, "Because it combined narrative and new form."
"He had an interesting teaching style: he didn't technically teach, he taught through example. I had an appointment to show him my work one time. It was on the Steinbeck [flatbed film viewer] but for the next hour he taught me the I Ching. We used it in our creative process; when you have a question you need answered, it is a neutral third party."
"[Nelson] talked a lot about how alive the scene was with his pal Wiley, [Bruce] Connor, the energy coming out of the Art Institute, the synergy of the visual experience. He had a love of life—for sure—and maintained relations with all of his old wives. I was kind of in awe of him."
Walsh is currently putting together an eight week series of pure Bob, working with Kitchen, who collected a number of his movies. It will include "Hauling Toto Big" (1997, 43 min).
"It is a great fucking film," Walsh said. "I asked him about the title. He said his mom would call a big shit 'poto big.'" Shot mostly in 80s when he was teaching in Milwaukee, he worked on it for 15 years. "It is a smart, well made film, loaded with sweat and toil and beauty and openness, like the book of Bob."
"He used text a lot [in 'Hauling Toto Big'], like Robert Service's poem 'The Cremation of Sam Magee'. One section has A, B, C, D, E and F rolls on the optical printer, which I helped him do. It is really a well-orchestrated film even though it has the feelings of being out of control."
Arguably his most humorous film is "The Off-Hand Jape" (1967) also made with Wiley. Set against a stark background, Wiley is Dr. Otis Bird and Nelson is Butch Bebab, experts in the off-hand jape, the ridiculous retort and the goofy gesture.
"He made one piece here called 'Hamlet Act'," recalled UW-Milwaukee's Blau, who grew up in the Haight-Ashbury, even attending the same grade school as Nelson but two generations later. "There was a guy who had written a script [based on Shakespeare]. [Nelson] was the only one who could do it and I convinced him. He said, 'Yes, but you play Hamlet.' It became this very interesting performance, documentary and acting, film and video—he's in it as well—a revolving hall of mirrors, from a failed performance to moments of brilliance."
"He was always interested in not repeating himself, doing something authentic to his take on the world. We had a lot of [teachers] from NY but they had a Mandarin attitude and stern Puritanism. It was better to have a Pied Piper from the West Coast. At the same time, he was a structuralist himself but he was always laughing at it."
"There were three main things Bob said as a teacher," said Blau, who taight alongside him. "Number one: be a thousand to one filmmaker. Just keep at it! If you keep one foot for every thousand you shoot, you can be a filmmaker. Two: A filmmaker should shoot like a skilled waiter with a loaded tray trying to negotiate a crowded restaurant. And three: you have to cut out your mother's face. You have to be unsentimental: it's about the film not the thing you love."
Kenneth Baker, the SF Chronicle's eminence gris art critic, exalted Nelson in his obit, singling out his use of found footage in "Bleu Shut" (1970) and "his prizing of process over product in film aesthetics" which "found echoes in the work of artists in other visual media." Baker also contacted Oona, who remarked in an email that Nelson had a "love-hate-hate" relationship with the art world.
"My father made art his whole adult life. He painted, did sculptural assemblages, worked on drawings, made photo-collages and films up until the end. He left a studio full of paintings only one of them unfinished [but] he showed the work rarely. Re-editing films. Destroying others. Pouring polyurethane on some films and making them into sculptural assemblages."
"He took his films out of circulation at one point," Fulton remembered. "Now someone in Hollywood is distributing them but he made a special arrangement. If you are old person, you don't pay; if you are an institution, you pay extra. He gave the rights to one of his films to me: I can throw it away if I want."
Nelson with Lori Felked in the ticket booth in the Mission where Canyon Cinema shows. photo: J. Fulton
"When he retired to paint, he didn't see many people. He got deep into Buhddism and that kept his head. His son Steve asked him, when he was dieing, if they should have a memorial. He said, 'No,' although he did allow for a few old friends coming over for drinks."
Bruce Baillee tried to honor this with an eleventh hour gathering on February 3rd in Washington Square, San Francisco, but he himself is older, slower and with limited Internet abilities not to mention in Washington State not square. Baillee told me: "He was one of us, those who painted our story on the teepee walls, a 20th and 21st century warrior, poet and good guy."
"I remember his quick wit, his equanimity, his carpentry skills," said Wiley, chuckling, "which allowed us to build a three-story cabin up [in Laytonville, which Wiley and Nelson shared]. We used to do drawings together, like conversations, taking turns on the same drawing. He was a powerful teacher—effected a lot of students."
"I just feel lucky he and I got to know each other, spend time together and form a deep friendship. I was just talking with Steve, his son. I think it was full life, he didn't miss a beat—all in all a good gig."Posted on Feb 02, 2012 - 11:43 AM