Nathaniel Dorsky
Nathaniel Dorsky (born July 28, 1943) raised in New York on a steady diet of Westerns and Disney True-Life Adventures 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".
Photos
Movies (97)
Illuminations
2026 · Self
Dreams Reveal a Weightless World
2024 · Director, Director of Photography, Editor
O Death
2023 · Director, Director of Photography, Editor
Place d'or
2023 · Director
Caracole (for Izcali)
2023 · Director, Editor, Cinematography
Pavane
2023 · Director
Dialogues
2022 · Director
Naos
2022 · Director
Caracole (for Mac)
2022 · Director
Interval
2022 · Director
Ember Days
2021 · Director, Cinematography, Editor
Terce
2021 · Director
Emanations
2020 · Director
William
2020 · Director
Temple Sleep
2020 · Director
Lamentations
2020 · Director
Canticles
2019 · Director
Caracole (for Cecilia)
2019 · Director
Apricity
2019 · Director
Interlude
2019 · Director
Calyx
2018 · Director
Colophon (for the Arboretum Cycle)
2018 · Director
Arboretum Cycle
2018 · Director
September
2018 · Director
Epilogue
2018 · Director
Monody
2018 · Director
Elohim
2017 · Director
Abaton
2017 · Director
Ode
2017 · Director
Coda
2017 · Director
Memories of Jerome Hiler
2016 · Self
The Dreamer
2016 · Director
Ossuary
2016 · Director
Lux Perpetua II
2016 · Director
Lux Perpetua I
2016 · Director
Death of a Poet
2016 · Director
Other Archer
2016 · Director
Autumn
2015 · Director
Prelude
2015 · Director
Intimations
2015 · Director
Avraham
2014 · Director
Fortune
2014 · Editorial Production Assistant
December
2014 · Director
Nathaniel Dorsky: An Interview
2014 · Self
February
2014 · Director
Summer
2013 · Director
Spring
2013 · Director
Song
2013 · Director
Kodachrome Carl Rakosi in Golden Gate Park
2013 · Director
New Shores
2012
August and After
2012 · Director, Producer, Editor, Director of Photography
April
2012 · Director
Interview with Nathaniel Dorsky
2011 · Himself
The Return
2011 · Director
Music Makes a City: A Louisville Orchestra Story
2010 · Editor
Pastourelle
2010 · Director
Aubade
2010 · Director
Compline
2009 · Director
Sarabande
2008 · Director
Winter
2008 · Director
Song and Solitude
2006 · Director
Kodachrome Dailies from the Time of Song and Solitude (Reel 1)
2006 · Director
Kodachrome Dailies from the Time of Song and Solitude (Reel 2)
2006 · Director
Threnody
2004 · Director, Cinematography, Editor
Monumental: David Brower's Fight for Wild America
2004 · Editor
The Visitation
2002 · Director
Love's Refrain
2001 · Director, Cinematography
Arbor Vitae
2000 · Director, Cinematography
Night Waltz: The Music of Paul Bowles
2000 · Cinematography, Editor
Wayfinders: A Pacific Odyssey
1999 · Editor
Variations
1998 · Director, Cinematography
Triste
1996 · Director, Cinematography
Black Sheep Boy
1995 · Associate Editor
The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg
1994 · Editor
Rembrandt Laughing
1989 · Daniel
Renga
1989 · Director
Alaya
1987 · Director
17 Reasons Why
1987 · Director
What Happened to Kerouac?
1986 · Co-Producer, Editor
Pneuma
1983 · Director
Ariel
1983 · Director
Hours for Jerome
1982 · Director, Editor, Cinematography
Divided Loyalties
1978 · Himself
Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives
1977 · Self
Revenge of the Cheerleaders
1976 · Producer, Director of Photography, Story, Screenplay
Look Park
1974 · Editor
Carriage Trade
1972 · himself
Library
1970 · Director
Holiday
1968
Diaries, Notes, and Sketches
1968 · Self
Letter to D.H. in Paris
1967 · Himself
Fool’s Spring (Two Personal Gifts)
1967 · Director
Abstraction
1967 · Editor, Director of Photography
Summerwind
1966 · Director
A Fall Trip Home
1965 · Director
Ingreen
1964 · Director
Catch A Tiger
1963 · Director
TV shows (0)
No credits available.