Robert Nelson

May 11 and 12, 2006

The films of Robert Nelson, their sparkling and anarchic humour and their astonishing wealth of imagination, are legendary (in the truest sense of the word). With only a few exceptions – Oh Dem Watermelons or The Great Blondino, two classics of the avant-garde -, his films have been inaccessible for decades; the artist himself had disappeared from public view.

Celebrated in the 1960s and 70s as a central figure of New American Cinema and the San Francisco art scene, Nelson the "trickster" seemed to have vanished into the realm of myth.

Thanks to the initiative of a few film curators, Nelson's works are now back in all their former glory. The artist, now 76, has also resurfaced; up until recently, he was making films and reworking older ones, more or less unnoticed by the film world. Nelson will be in Vienna to introduce and comment on four programmes with works from the years 1963 to 1997.

His selection spans from the bizarrely erotic found footage film Confessions of a Black Mother-Succuba and deeply "Californian" works steeped in pop culture, such as Grateful Dead, Hot Leatherette and Plastic Haircut (a Dada-inspired performance with music by Steve Reich) to more contemplative and personal films like Suite California and Deep Westurn, as well as playful reflections on the media (Bleu Shut, Hamlet Act). Re-discovering Nelson also means entering the domain of the unpredictable, a brave new world of irreverence.

This programme has been organized together with Mark Toscano and Mark Webber and in cooperation with the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival.