Join us for another On Site Moving Image Series Saturday October 3rd! Doors at 6:30.

Nathaniel Dorsky: Three Films

A rare presentation of three films by Nathaniel Dorsky, made in succession between 2002-2006.

Nathaniel Dorsky (b.1943) is an experimental film maker and editor, and has been making films since 1963. Dorsky’s 16mm  films “elicit poetic and contemplative moments of observation; they are occasions for meditations on light, landscape, time, and consciousness. Capturing oftentimes quotidian or verdant settings, the luminous film stills reveal everyday existence as profoundly stimulating and sublime” (Peter Blum Gallery).

The Visitation

(2002, 18 minutes) 

The Visitation is a gradual unfolding, an arrival so to speak. I felt the necessity to describe an occurrence, not one specifically of time and place, but one of revelation in one’s own psyche. The place of articulation is not so much in the realm of images as information, but in the response of the heart to the poignancy of the cuts. 

Threnody

(2004, 25 min)

Threnody is a somber but luminous progression through a delicate articulation of earthly phenomena… an offering to a friend who died. It is the second of two devotional songs, the first being The Visitation. These two films were preceded by a series of Four Cinematic Songs: Triste, Variations, Arbor Vitae, and Love’s Refrain. 

Song and Solitude

(2006, 21 min)

Song and Solitude was conceived and photographed with the loving collaboration of Susan Vigil during the last year of her life. Its balance is more toward an expression of inner landscape, or what it feels like to be, rather than an exploration of the external visual world as such.

All films 16mm, silent, color, and projected at 18 fps. Film descriptions by Nathaniel Dorsky.

"In film, there are two ways of including human beings. One is depicting them. Another is to create a film form which, in itself, has all the qualities of being human: tenderness, observation, fear, curiosity, the sense of stepping into the world, sudden murky disruptions and undercurrents, expansion, pulling back, contraction, relaxation, sublime revelation. In my work, the screen is transformed into a "speaking character", and the images function as pure energy rather than acting as secondary symbol or as a source for information or storytelling. I put shots together to create a revelation of wisdom through delicate surprise. The montage does not lead to verbal understanding, but is actual and present. The narrative is that which takes place between the viewer and the screen. Silence allows these delicate articulations of vision which are simultaneously poetic and sculptural to be fully experienced." - Nathaniel Dorsky