Movies: Nathaniel Dorsky

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....

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....

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. I was touched by their seriousness, but also per...

Variations is a 1998 American short silent avant-garde film directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. It is the second film in a set of "Four Cinematic Songs," which also includes Triste, Arbor Vitae, Love's Refrain....

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....

Like a memory already gone, this place of life....

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. I felt the necessity to describe an occurrence, not one specifically of time and place, but one of revelati...

These four films spontaneously manifested as four stages of life: childhood, youth, maturity and old age. Elohim was photographed in early spring, the week of the Lunar New Year, the very spirit of Creation. Abaton was photographed a few weeks later ...

"This footage was shot and edited from 1966 to 1970 and then edited to completion over a two year period ending in July 1982. Hours for Jerome (as in a Book of Hours) is an arrangement of images, energies, and illuminations from daily life. These fra...

In the last few years I have been making a series of cinematic portraits of young filmmaking friends acting as collaborators in portraiture.There is always a surprise as to what the Bolex reveals of a person that is not revealed with the naked eye.Th...

Warren Sonbert described Divided Loyalties as a film 'about art vs. industry and their various crossovers.' According to film critic Amy Taubin, "There is a clear analogy between the filmmaker and the dancers, acrobats and skilled workers who make up...

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. He struggles with conflicting feelings about a man who was a gifted artist, but a difficult and unsupportive fat...

Emanations is the third film made during the COVID crises… in this case October and November reveal small joys in a melancholic sea....

A personal travel film shot in Oaxaca and then in France and Italy....

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. The Dreamer is born ...

“For most of my life, my films have been the marriage of external circumstances as seen through the needs of my own psyche. There is no other plan as such. Occasionally these explorations result in a film that is not quite what I would call a public ...

"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. In the case of Avraham, the title came first. It was not only the film’s inspiration ...

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....

A document from the weeks that Stan Brakhage was dying of bladder cancer. Dominic Angerame, then head of Canyon Cinema, and I went up to Victoria, Canada to visit Stan. Five weeks later while I was in Boulder, Colorado to screen my recent films, Stan...

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. -- N.D....