ROBERT NELSON (1931–2012)

Experimental filmmaker Robert Nelson, whose “films brought spontaneity, teasing, and wit to the often deadly serious arena of avant-garde moviemaking,” passed away at eighty-one years old, reports Bruce Weber of the New York Times. Nelson was originally trained as a painter, studying at the San Francisco Art Institute and Mills College. He was active in the San Francisco arts scene in the late 1950s and early ’60s, making films with artists including William T. Wiley and William Allan as well as groups like the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Notable works include Plastic Haircut, 1963, a “fifteen-minute film built around a mesmerizing, rapid-fire series of kooky visual images” and Oh Dem Watermelons_, 1965, a “brazenly sardonic evisceration of racism that exploits its stereotypical symbol,” which shows watermelons being “gutted like a slain animal and being splattered or otherwise destroyed in various ways, set to a repetitive Steve Reich score that made vivid use of the antebellum songwriting of Stephen Foster.”

Weber writes that Nelson’s films were “confoundingly plotless but cleverly and energetically edited to render images in often poignant, often uproarious juxtaposition. Nelson’s movies are varied in tone and subject matter, but they all exhibit the subversive relish of a renegade, quirky wit.”

Of his artistic process, Nelson, who never received formal training as filmmaker, said: “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. We were bent on having a good time.”