Long-time Bay Area artists Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley first began making films together in 1966. This will be the first Bay Area screening of Before Need, their most ambitious work, in more than 5 years. “We started with some dream images, a few actors, friends, and relatives. Slowly the film evolved into sequences or images that expressed the emotional discoveries of an aging woman… Standards of Perfection applied to all the selves, the relationships, the layers of memory.” — G.N./D.W.

“Suddenly, before one’s eyes, a pictorial work unfolds, taut, complexly rich and beyond verbal logic, working like a music piece by Penderecki or Cage. I think its picture web about time and death language belongs to the most complete that the experimental film has reached.” — Carl Henrik Swenstedt, Expressen (translation).

Gunvor has been a member of the S.F. Art Institute faculty since the early ‘70s.