Nathaniel Dorsky

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. Blending everyday encounters with portraits of the avant-garde art scene, it forms an epic, personal meditation on community, creativity, and the passage of time.

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.

More than two dozen men and women of various backgrounds, ages, and races talk to the camera about being gay or lesbian. Their stories are arranged in loose chronology: early years, fitting in (which for some meant marriage), coming out, establishing adult identities, and reflecting on how things have changed and how things should be.

Compilation of footage shot from 1974-96, developing on Dorsky's theory of polyvalent editing.

The recording of the daily events of Dorsky and his partner, artist Jerome Hiler, around Lake Owassa in New Jersey and in Manhattan. The two parts of the films revolve around the four seasons with the first part revolving around spring through summer, while the second part revolves around fall through winter.

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 so much of his subject matter." -- Jon Gartenberg. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with Estate Project for Artists with AIDS in 1998.

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.

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.

Compilation of footage shot from 1974-96, developing on Dorsky's theory of polyvalent editing.

Compilation of footage shot from 1974-96, developing on Dorsky's theory of polyvalent editing.

The recording of the daily events of Dorsky and his partner, artist Jerome Hiler, around Lake Owassa in New Jersey and in Manhattan. The two parts of the films revolve around the four seasons with the first part revolving around spring through summer, while the second part revolves around fall through winter.

Initially titled "Books for all". A moving institutional commission in which the filmmakers lovingly portray New Jersey's public library system.

Dark and stately is the warm, graceful tenderness of the Sarabande.

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.

17 Reasons Why was photographed with a variety of semi-ancient regular 8 cameras and is projected unslit as 16mm. The four image format gives a look at the film frame itself.

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 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.

A dedication to Jane Wodening and an ode to the winter sun.

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 passed away. There was a gathering at Stan’s daughter’s house with Jane (Brakhage) Wodening and her brother, poet, Jack Collom in Boulder. That night it began to snow and like a purification it did not stop for five days.

Perhaps the most delicately tactile in the series of four cinematic songs, Love's Refrain rests moment to moment on its own surface. It is a coda in twilight, a soft-spoken conclusion to a set of cinematic songs.

The ever-presence of death.

Primordial spring is in the air, all is tentative.

“Renga is a linked-verse form of Japanese poetry that, though still practiced today, reached its peak between the 13th and 16th centuries. It is characterized by being a group composition, typically in the presence of judges and an audience, with poets rapidly contributing stanzas such that each new stanza addresses only the previous stanza; there is no overarching plot development, and the overall structure is a chain, not a conventional, linear narrative… In 1989, I had the great privilege to be involved in a film renga that was produced in the graduate film seminar led by Nathaniel Dorsky at the San Francisco Art Institute.” —Eric Theise

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. April is intended as a companion piece for August and After, and is partly funded by a gift from Carla Liss.

"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

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 preceeded by a series of Four Cinematic Songs: Triste, Variations, Arbor Vitae, and Love’s Refrain.

A short portrait of a dear friend and collaborator on Devotional Cinema, Nick Hoff.

An exploration of the cycle of life and the inevitability of passing.

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.”

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

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

“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 film, something, perhaps, to be shown as camera original in the privacy of one’s apartment. I would like to use the rare opportunity of this lecture format to show two of these intimate works as original Kodachrome, each quite different from the other. One is called LUX PERPETUA II (1999-2002/2016, 31 min, 16mm) and the other, OSSUARY (1995-2005/2016, 43 min, 16mm). They are made up of outtakes from decades of shooting 16mm Kodachrome.” – Nathaniel Dorsky

Arbor Vitae is a gesture towards a cinema of pure being. Its atmosphere is haunted by the period in which it was shot, the year of 1999. Although the cuts are open and numerous in their intent, the underlying motivation is the delicate reveal of the transparency of presence, our tender mystery midst the elaborate unfolding of the tree of life.

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.

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

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. – Nathaniel Dorsky

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

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

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 different aspects of our own being.

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 along with the Arboretum Cycle, but a new thing, a spring later, a different maker, so to speak. N.D.

"Temple Sleep was photographed and edited during the initial Virus lockdown. The fly casting pools in Golden Gate Park became a mind healing place for me, a calming space of sacredness, tempered by the fear of the on-coming unknown. A place of feminine power" - N.D.

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 was to first select the footage I wanted to use from the original camera rolls and then make an internegative and work print of that selected material to work with in the editing. (In an earlier period, I did not have to first make an internegative, but could more simply make a work print directly off the camera original, but Kodak cancelled the reversal work print film stock.)

After a lifetime, two mutual friends, George Kuchar and Carla Liss, passed away during the same period of time.

After a lifetime, two mutual friends, George Kuchar and Carla Liss, passed away during the same period of time.

A silent portrait of Dorsky's collaborator exploring her Aztec heritage.

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.