Audio transcription

“I'm definitely not interested in passing along intellectual information about California. There's plenty of that everywhere. I'm trying to get at some feeling state.” – Robert Nelson

Suite California is a work of deep feeling, insight, humor and intelligence that finds Nelson working at the height of his formal innovation and, at the same time, at his most personally revealing and emotionally generous. The Suite California films were originally intended as a much longer, multipart travelogue traversing the wide cultural and geographical diversity of all of California. Nelson completed two parts—covering Southern California and the Bay Area—and the results trace the vast and unpredictable area between a rich personal reading of a place and the place itself. Although both works feature Nelson's characteristic brilliant humor throughout, they are also deeply reflective and filled with unexpected, revelatory insight about the subjective experience of his home state, and his own place in it. – Mark Toscano