Nathaniel Dorsky

Known for DirectingBorn 1943-01-01 (age 83)New York City, New York, USA

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".Read more

Movies & web series

Arboretum Cycle

Divided Loyalties

Ariel

Lamentations

New Shores

Alaya

The Visitation

Holiday

Hours for Jerome

Apricity

Summer

Kodachrome Carl Rakosi in Golden Gate Park

Carriage Trade

The Return

Triste

Diaries, Notes, and Sketches

Variations

Monumental: David Brower's Fight for Wild America

Night Waltz: The Music of Paul Bowles

Song and Solitude

O Death

February

December

Aubade

Pastourelle

Music Makes a City: A Louisville Orchestra Story

Compline

Sarabande

Threnody

Arbor Vitae

Black Sheep Boy

17 Reasons Why

What Happened to Kerouac?

Look Park

The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg

August and After

Rembrandt Laughing

Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives

Letter to D.H. in Paris

Revenge of the Cheerleaders

Pneuma

Dreams Reveal a Weightless World

Caracole (for Izcali)

Place d'or

Pavane

Naos

Interval

Dialogues