Devoted Songs: The Films of Nathaniel Dorsky.
Curated by Lumière Magazine and Esperanza Collado.
Introduced by Daniel Fitzpatrick.
6.30pm / Tuesday 22 April 2014
Irish Film Institute - 6 Eustace Street, Temple Bar, Dublin
Book tickets.
When I woke up from the
dream I only conserved one image of it, but it represented the entire dream. My
memory, wisely, didn't want to do or say more. Perhaps that remembered image
didn't even coincide with the ones I had dreamt. This is how Nathaniel Dorsky’s
films work, and he seems happy to continue with this purpose of oblivion. Maybe
for this reason, all that follows only belongs to the realm of so-called poetic
justice.*
The cinema of Nathaniel Dorsky possesses a beauty that is not
sustained in either a narrative form or a political motivation. It’s born from
a desire to establish relations from one shot to the next, and to knowing what
visual or emotional association we can create between two images that
apparently don't have anything to do with each other. The filmmaker, almost
like a street poet, has gone over the streets of San Francisco for more than
forty years with the motivation of finding in quotidian spaces images capable
of explaining his complex relationship with the world. Dorsky tells us that
during some stages of his life, his difficulty to express himself, to
communicate with the rest of the world, urged him to make films, the only
medium with which he could manifest what he really felt, or in which he could
get lost freely, isolating himself with his camera and finding shelter under a
world that only he knew.
The alchemist had shown us that the camera is capable of arranging forms
and matter in states that the eye wouldn't be able to manage. Out of focus
shots and superimpositions, which Dorsky appreciated highly in Brakhage’s
cinema, keep the surface of objects, landscapes and people partially at a
distance, while jump cuts prevent us from turning to the temptation of
establishing the type of associations our brain usually imposes (glances,
words, behavioural communication), privileging instead the electrical charge
detached from the shots themselves: it’s more about feeling than thinking,
hence the difficulty of remembering these films in detail, and the exhaustion
they produce. In that condition, when these films are perceived next to each
other, or rather, separated from each other, we reach a more elemental and
intimate level of so-called open montage, where voltaic arcs liberate all their
energy until they burst in a final coda.
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| The Visitation, 2002, Nathaniel Dorsky |
In this sense, in The
Visitation (2002), the first of the three “devotional songs” conceived by
Dorsky as the gradual revelation of a fact not specifically circumscribed by a
site, but by a psyche, the articulation is not established so much within the
realm of images, as it is in “the response of the heart to the poignancy of the
cuts”[1].
At the start, filmmaker Jerome Hiler, who is seen from the back filming in the opposite
direction, holds a sheet that he will use to create his medieval stained glass.
Next, we see his face through the glass, flecked by the light that leaks
through and ready to examine its qualities. These two shots not only remind us
that –as P. Adams Sitney has written- “the film camera is a chamber with a
glass screen built to preserve luminous stains in motion that go through it”,
they also are evidence of a tactical opening: the mirror as a threshold, as a
spectral passage implicit in another world, a fantastic one undoubtedly: a reverse
angle that separates the external space from an interior, mental one. When
Hiler looks at this suggested mirror, he gets a double image of himself, that
of the very ghost induced by the cinema: curved, broken, or parallel lines of
mystery, the superimposition of all its sides, the screen itself.
The vague haze over a blue lake, the bottom of its waters reflected
on the ceiling of a room, the gentle motion of the grass on a hilltop, the
quietness of the night and the black depths of a wetland, vibrations or light
blowing on some curtains, the nets or grilles in shadows (tennis rackets,
chains, mosquito nets, bicycle wheels), the different natural fabrics (petals
and leaves, resinous logs), superimposed crystals – an aquarium in which a fish
dives in the middle of the street- or a figurative eclipse –half of the moon
covered by clouds- do not just take us to that particular mental state, or in
some cases to the rhythms and cadence of nature and the different seasons, but,
in a more complex way, depending on the directions of the shadows projected by
each object, to the different hours of the day, all of them condensed in one
single screen that has “always identified itself with a mirror only capable of
reflecting the images it has kept.”[2]
"In
film, there are two ways of including human beings. One is depicting human
beings. Another is to create a film form which, in itself, has all the
qualities of being human: tenderness, observation, fear, relaxation, the sense
of stepping into the world and pulling back, expansion, contraction, changing,
softening, tenderness of heart. The first is a form of theatre and the latter
is a form of poetry." - Nathaniel Dorsky
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| Winter, 2008, Nathaniel Dorsky Click here to listen to Dorsky's presentation of Winter at (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periferico, A Coruña, Spain, June 2011 |
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| Alaya, 1987, Nathaniel Dorsky |
Delving into Alaya, the
film is made of around 76 shots in which Dorsky registers, shot by shot, sand
grains in different “stages”: either in motion, or still, by means of different
grades of illumination, scale and relief (field of depth plays an important
role). Each of these “shots-stages” is meticulously composed. We even know
–from the words of Dorsky himself- that some of the shots where “reconstructed”
in the basement of his home, as a “mock-up”, with sand, an Electrolux vacuum
and some spotlights, to illuminate something that, on the other hand,
accentuates the idea of scale, distance, and frame, very present formally in
the film, to the point of often creating difficulties in distinguishing between
the macroscopic and the microscopic due to perspectival ambiguity and
ambivalence, if we are before small sand grooves or large dunes; or before a
slight shift of the sand or the vibration of the filmic grain itself: “There
are plenty of moments in Alaya where
the shot is formed almost 60% by grain and 40% by sand”.[3]
In spite of any attempt to analyse or find a syntax for Dorsky’s
films, they are characterised by their resistance to interpretations and the
way they dissolve in memory by means of a sort of erasure from which it would
be impossible, after having watched them, to make a thorough or precise
reconstruction. In this sense, we should contemplate his cinema as an
experience-based, phenomenal event.
*This text is made
of a selection of excerpts taken from Revista Lumière 05 (June 2012) and 06
(July 2013), Barcelona. Written by Miguel Blanco Hortas, Francisco Algarín
Navarro, and Félix García de Villegas. Edited and translated by Esperanza Collado. Special
thanks to Maximilian Le Cain.
The films
Dorsky insists that his films are
shown silently (another trait he shares with Brakhage) screened from 16mm
prints with no accompanying soundtrack and typically projected at what he
refers to as the ‘sacred speed’ of 18 frames per second, as oppose to the
standard rate of 24 frames per second. The 18 fps standard was established
during the silent period, a slower pace which produces a more visible flicker
and more readily reveals the gaps between frames. (Daniel Fitzpatrick)
Winter
2008 | 21.5 minutes |
silent speed | 18 fps | 16 mm
| color | silent
Alaya
1987 | 28 minutes | silent
speed | 18 fps | 16 mm
| color | silent
The Visitation
2002 | 18 minutes | silent speed | 18 fps | 16 mm | color | silent
[1] Dorsky, N.
Description of The Visitation. www.nathanieldorsky.net
[2] “When Dorsky
titled his film The Visitation, he
had in mind medieval books elucidated with “hours of the Virgin Mary”, in which
the visit of pregnant Mary to her cousin Isabel, herself also pregnant by John
the Baptist- illustrate praises, the ritual service by the dawn. The emergence
of light and its itinerary over the surface of the world is the true subject of
the film.” Sitney, P. A. 2007. Tone Poems.
Artforum, Vol. 46, n 3, November.
[3] MacDonald, S. A Critical Cinema 5. Interviews with
Independent Filmmakers.
