My Name Is Oona is a 1969 experimental short film (ten minutes) directed by Gunvor Nelson.
The film is Gunvor Nelson's portrait of her nine-year-old daughter, Oona. Oona's activities are pretty mundane: she smiles for the camera, she brushes her horse, she roughhoused with a friend, she rides her horse in an open field. However the film, shot in stark black-and-white, is a series of avant-garde images—superimpositions, negative images, super slo-mo. Adding to the weirdness is the soundtrack, which consists mostly of Oona Nelson saying the sentence "My name is Oona" over and over and over and over again, with that single line of dialogue distorted, double-tracked, and otherwise played with.
Tropes:
- Arc Words: "My name is Oona My name is Oona My name is Oona"...sometimes it comes off as a statement of identity, sometimes more like a Madness Mantra.
- Deliberately Monochrome: Shot in a very harsh black-and-white, which only serves to make the whole film more surreal.
- Face Framed in Shadow: Oona is shown this way repeatedly, especially towards the end, in shots that increase the overall creepiness of the mood.
- Self-Backing Vocalist: Sometimes "My Name Is Oona" is double-tracked slightly out of sync, for a weird echo effect.
- Title Drop: The title is dropped, and dropped, and dropped, and dropped some more. Other portions of the film are just Oona saying the name "Oona", that single word being drawn out and distorted repeatedly until it sounds quite alien.
