Movies: Nathaniel Dorsky

Nathaniel Dorsky's Spring conjures an abundant return of light and a retreat into nature so dense and rich that the film itself becomes a sort of wondrous garden-verdant, incandescent, with startling bursts of colour....

"A pastourelle and an aubade are two different forms of courtship songs from the Troubadour tradition. In this case, the film Pastourelle, a sister film to Aubade, is in the more tumultuous key of spring." - Nathaniel Dorsky...

The images in this film come from an extensive collection of out-dated raw stock that has been processed without being exposed, and sometimes rephotographed in closer format. Each pattern of grain takes on its own emotional life, an evocation of diff...

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. N.D....

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.”...

"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.' ... This film is shot with the overall...

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). Jacob, a young filmmaker, offered to help me with some shooting and became the ...

Epilogue is the seventh film in the Arboretum Cycle, a descent into the dark damp earth, a period of dying....

The Kodachrome Dailies consist of all the Kodachrome footage chosen to be worked with to make the film Song and Solitude during years 2005 and 2006. During that period I still had the great privilege to be shooting Kodachrome. My method for editing w...

San Francisco's winter is a season unto itself. Fleeting, rain-soaked, verdant, a brief period of shadows and renewal....

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....

"I have been wanting to make a shorter film in and about a briefer period of time. December was photographed during this often turbulent month and edited soon after. It has a purity of form which I find quite rewarding." - Nathaniel Dorsky...

“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. That a film could be inside out...

A monody is an ode sung by a single actor in a Greek tragedy, a poem lamenting a person’s death. In this case, the sixth section of the Arboretum Cycle, the death of the garden itself....

"Lamentations is a cinematic tumble through diverse dreamscapes in a man-made world." —N.D....

Abaton, a sacred place, a sanctuary for dreaming and healing....

A strange autumnal in an empty world, a film of late autumn and ghostly presences....

“A brief lost moment lies between.” — Nathaniel Dorsky...

“The title Apricity refers to the warmth of the sun in winter. It is an homage to the writer Jane (Brakhage) Wodening. In speaking to her I mused, ‘perhaps your age is the winter and you are the warmth of the sun.’” –Nathaniel Dorsky...

Colophon (for the Arboretum Cycle) has three sections. It is in the spirit of the early Chinese landscape colophons, a text added to the horizontal scroll at a later date from when the landscape itself was enacted. Colophon was not made to be shown a...