Nathaniel Dorsky Movies

“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...

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

September’s ripeness, a blessing on earth, our Indian summer.

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...

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

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,...

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...

Dorsky’s three earliest works (made when he “entered the realm of poetic filmmaking as an active maker”), all sound films, with...

During a tour with my films in Spain last spring, I had the pleasure of being honoured with the attention of three young people who offered me the...

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...

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...

Often I go out shooting with my Bolex in the park’s Arboretum. During the autumn and winter of 2003/2004 I would more than likely run into...

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

Shot in San Francisco from autumn of last year through the winter solstice, Nathaniel Dorsky's Song evinces a cool, mysterious tone as it captures...

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...

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

Stoned people, music, movement, fields.

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...

An aubade is a poem or morning song evoking the first rays of the sun at daybreak. Often, it includes the atmosphere of lovers parting. This film is...

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...