Description
“That Gunvor Nelson is indeed one of the most gifted of our poetic film humanists is revealed in Kirsa Nicholina, her masterpiece. This deceptively simple film of a child being born to a couple in their home is an almost classic manifesto of the new sensibility, a proud affirmation of man amidst technology, genocide, and ecological destruction. Birth is presented not as an antiseptic, ‘medical’ experience (the usual birth film focuses on an anonymous vagina appropriately surrounded by a white shroud) but as a living-through of a primitive mystery, a spiritual celebration, a rite of passage. True to the newest sensibility, it does not aggressively proselytize but conveys its ideology by force of example. With husband and friends quietly present, the strikingly pretty young woman, in fetching terrycloth and red socks, is practically nude throughout; her whole body is seen at times, and for once the continuity between lovepartner and birth-giver is maintained; she remains ‘erotic.’ We never once forget that she is a woman and that the new life came from sexual desire ….” – Amos Vogel, The Village Voice