In Before Need Redressed, Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley revisit their 1979 experimental film, Before Need, creating a shorter version that benefits from the artists’ evolving perspectives and experience as they have aged. The re-edited film is a complex, layered montage of sound and image investigating memory, language and death.
Gunvor Nelson is one of avant garde film’s most exceptional talents. Her films, incorporating experimentation with the lens, stop frame, painted film stock, found footage, and dramatized scenes, were cited by Stan Brakhage as “more true to the intrinsic possibilities of film than any but a few in the history of the medium.”
She made some films with Dorothy Wiley and their partnership is one of the most fruitful collaborations that emerged from the dynamic avant-garde film culture of the Bay Area of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Their most famous film, Schmeerguntz (1966), is widely acknowledged as an avant-garde classic, if not a classic of feminist art.
