Nathaniel Dorsky Trailers
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Raised in New York on a steady diet of Westerns and Disney True-Life Adventures, Nathaniel Dorsky started shooting 8mm movies at the age of eleven. In 1963, when he had just turned 20, he made Ingreen, a boldly symbolic psychodrama about a young man’s sexual coming of age. At that film’s premiere, he met soon-to-be fellow filmmaker Jerome Hiler, who would become his partner in life and a major inspiration for his work. (“We were filming for one another,” Hiler recently said.) In 1971 the two moved to San Francisco, where they’ve lived ever since. Around the same time, Dorsky entered a decade-long creative silence. He returned in 1982 with Hours for Jerome, a 55-minute feature compiled from footage shot between 1966 and 1970. Like all of Dorsky’s subsequent work, it’s a kind of cinematic lyric poem, entirely silent and rooted in a centuries-old tradition of devotional art (in this case, medieval illuminated manuscripts and prayer books).
The rest of the Eighties found Dorsky experimenting with new forms and materials: 1987’s Alaya was made up entirely of footage of shifting sand, and 1983’s Ariel, which had a rare public screening at this year’s New York Film Festival, is a beautiful hand-processed film full of thin, tremulous vertical lines and see-sawing horizontals. It was with 1996’s Triste—edited from over 20 years’ worth of footage—that Dorsky, as he once put it, fully arrived at “the level of cinema language that I have been working towards.” Since then, he’s made 16 luminous, description-defying short films, each with their own distinct tones and shadings. In films like Compline (09), August and After (12), and his two most recent titles, Spring and Song, Dorsky creates what he’s often called a “floating world,” in which street scenes, household interiors, meadows, rivers and forests are transformed into playgrounds for light, color and shadow. In a field often dominated by frenetic cutting and/or prolonged stasis, Dorsky’s films unfurl gradually but steadily in a kind of hushed suspension. They’re often attempts to do with light and texture what, in his book Devotional Cinema, Dorsky praised Mozart for having done in key changes and melodic lines: to “wed [a] style to the human metabolism in every detail".
Most Popular Nathaniel Dorsky Trailers
Total trailers found: 95
15 October 2017
These four films spontaneously manifested as four stages of life: childhood, youth, maturity and old age.
31 December 2002
The first of two devotional songs. Part One of a set of Two Devotional Songs. “The Visitation” is a gradual unfolding, an arrival so to speak.
03 May 2022
Mac McGinnes, a dear friend and neighbor, often sat in with me during my editing sessions. This brief but light-filled farewell was made for Mac upon his passing.
01 January 2006
All the Kodachrome footage chosen to be worked with to make the film Song and Solitude during years 2005 and 2006.
01 February 2021
Terce is the sixth film made during the Covid crises… the yellow greens of spring at last… the beginning of a greater relaxation.
01 January 2014
"February was photographed during the first weeks of early spring in San Francisco. For me there is a haunted sense of restlessness in its form, some desire for a new freedom, a fresh sense of cinema.
02 October 2014
Norman’s father was a society portrait painter. After his father’s death, Norman faces the burden of inheriting his father’s life’s work.
17 September 2020
William Brown, the son of my dear friend, Owsley Brown, is majoring in acting at the University of Southern California.
06 February 2022
A bouquet from those final arid days of summer.
15 October 2017
These four films spontaneously manifested as four stages of life: childhood, youth, maturity and old age.
26 July 2022
A Naos is the inner room of an ancient Greek temple in which the image of the deity celebrated by that temple is depicted (usually in the form of a statue of that deity).
14 October 2022
The ever-presence of death.
11 December 2019
A strange autumnal in an empty world, a film of late autumn and ghostly presences.
01 November 1974
Look Park presents close up shots of a country stream viewed in bright sunlight. The film opens with wide shots of the park to establish the location of the water, then focuses in very tight on the abstract reflections and shadows.
27 October 2014
"In most of my films I have had the burden of adding a title afterwards. Sometimes the word or words would come automatically, but more often with great difficulty.
26 November 2020
Emanations is the third film made during the COVID crises… in this case October and November reveal small joys in a melancholic sea.
11 October 2019
“A brief lost moment lies between.” — Nathaniel Dorsky
01 January 2008
San Francisco's winter is a season unto itself. Fleeting, rain-soaked, verdant, a brief period of shadows and renewal.
20 October 2015
Autumn, photographed during the last months of the drought year, 2015, is a stately, but intimate, seasonal tome, a celebration of the poignancy and mystery of our later years.
12 April 2010
An aubade is a poem or morning song evoking the first rays of the sun at daybreak. Often, it includes the atmosphere of lovers parting.
05 February 2018
September’s ripeness, a blessing on earth, our Indian summer.
16 September 2011
During a tour with my films in Spain last spring, I had the pleasure of being honoured with the attention of three young people who offered me the opportunity to participate in the following interview.
05 February 2018
Epilogue is the seventh film in the Arboretum Cycle, a descent into the dark damp earth, a period of dying.
04 April 2013
Often I go out shooting with my Bolex in the park’s Arboretum. During the autumn and winter of 2003/2004 I would more than likely run into Carl Rakosi, a mere 100 years old, taking his daily constitutional with his companion, Marilyn Kane.
01 January 1967
“This modest little film completely turned me around. Up until that point I had been using the world to make a film, and what Jerome showed me was that the world itself, or life itself, could be the language of a film.
04 May 1965
Dorsky’s three earliest works (made when he “entered the realm of poetic filmmaking as an active maker”), all sound films, with dailies for two later works shot on precious Kodachrome stock.
31 May 2021
Primordial spring is in the air, all is tentative.
01 December 2024
Ossuary was made up of the Kodachrome outs and trims from more than a decade of shooting and making films in Kodachrome.
15 October 2017
Light in the gardens of the San Francisco Arboretum, photographed in early spring. Elohim are divine beings, the energy of light as creation.
29 September 2015
The fourth of the “cinematic songs,” followed by two new works “made by someone closer to passing on, by someone whose sense of life and sense of cinema have become inseparable in a very real way.
01 January 2012
Following a period of trauma and grief, the world around me once again declared itself in the form of one of the loveliest springs I can ever remember in San Francisco.
15 October 2017
Abaton, a sacred place, a sanctuary for dreaming and healing.
01 January 1967
Short film presented by the American Federation of Arts about the physics and characteristics of abstraction.
05 December 1996
Compilation of footage shot from 1974-96, developing on Dorsky's theory of polyvalent editing.
07 December 1987
17 Reasons Why was photographed with a variety of semi-ancient regular 8 cameras and is projected unslit as 16mm.
19 August 2004
From the moment David Brower first laid eyes on the beauty of the Yosemite Valley, he wanted to the fight to preserve the American wilderness for future generations.
14 October 2019
The first in a brief series of small personal gifts, made in celebration of the first birthday of Cecilia, the daughter of Antonella Bonfanti who for many years managed Canyon Cinema in San Francisco.
16 June 2000
Before he impressed the literary world with his books, author Paul Bowles was a music composer, collaborating with the likes of Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson.
31 January 1977
More than two dozen men and women of various backgrounds, ages, and races talk to the camera about being gay or lesbian.
06 May 1999
This award-winning PBS documentary sweeps viewers into a seafaring adventure with a community of Polynesians, as they build traditional sailing canoes, learn how to follow the stars across the open ocean, and embark upon a 2,000-mile voyage in the wake of their ancestors.
05 September 2008
Dark and stately is the warm, graceful tenderness of the Sarabande.
01 January 1989
“Renga is a linked-verse form of Japanese poetry that, though still practiced today, reached its peak between the 13th and 16th centuries.
01 December 2018
"Seven and a half weeks ago, I had open heart surgery...In the three weeks to go before the operation, I bought 21 rolls of film and said 'I'm going to shoot a roll of film every day until I go to the hospital.
23 May 1983
Ariel is a highly energetic and colorful divertissement of abstract film achieved with improvised home color processing and a physical, almost sculptural manipulation of the film surface.
01 January 2016
A short portrait of a dear friend and collaborator on Devotional Cinema, Nick Hoff.
03 October 2016
This year our mid-summer’s night was adorned with a glorious full moon. The weeks and days preceding the solstice were magically alive with crisp, cool breezes, bright, warm sunlight, and a general sense of heartbreaking clarity.
20 June 2023
Autumn lake in San Francisco.
02 May 2013
Shot in San Francisco from autumn of last year through the winter solstice, Nathaniel Dorsky's Song evinces a cool, mysterious tone as it captures the pulse (supernal at 18fps) of the city.
04 February 1966
Dorsky’s three earliest works (made when he “entered the realm of poetic filmmaking as an active maker”), all sound films, with dailies for two later works shot on precious Kodachrome stock.
05 February 2018
A cycle of seven movies filmed in San Francisco Arboretum during 2017. The chronological order of them goes as follows: Elohim, Abaton, Coda, Ode, September, Monody and Epilogue.
20 March 2023
How often and varied we come upon ourselves in this brief life. This film of early spring is a second made in collaboration with Jacob, a young filmmaking friend who also appeared in Naos.
01 January 2016
“For most of my life, my films have been the marriage of external circumstances as seen through the needs of my own psyche.
29 September 2015
The fourth of the “cinematic songs,” followed by two new works “made by someone closer to passing on, by someone whose sense of life and sense of cinema have become inseparable in a very real way.
01 January 2016
A personal travel film shot in Oaxaca and then in France and Italy.
17 September 2010
In 1948, a small, struggling, semi-professional orchestra in Louisville, Kentucky began a novel project to commission new works from contemporary composers around the world.
01 May 1976
The frisky cheerleading team at the anarchic Aloha High sets out to foil the plans of their local school board president, after he attempts to shut the school down in order to develop the land into a shopping mall.
01 March 1968
Also known as Walden, Jonas Mekas’s first diary film is a six-reel chronicle of his life in 1960s New York, interweaving moments with family, friends, lovers, and artistic idols.
10 October 2009
"Compline is a night devotion or prayer, the last of the canonical hours, the final act in a cycle. This film is also the last film I will be able to shoot in Kodachrome, a film stock I have shot since I was 10 years old.
20 August 1964
Dorsky’s three earliest works (made when he “entered the realm of poetic filmmaking as an active maker”), all sound films, with dailies for two later works shot on precious Kodachrome stock.
07 December 1987
Sand, wind, and light intermingle with the emulsions. The viewer is the star.
