5
Experimental
dossier
PORTRAIT NATHANIEL DORSKY
Fifty dollars for three and a half minutes of film, including the processing and the work-print. The American filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky, 68, a native New Yorker, has a lifelong experience in shooting with his 16mm Bolex. His current one is only his third in more than 40 years of activity. He knows what he wants and how to get it, without using a lightmeter, but just trusting his experience and the quality of the film he's using - Kodachrome until few years ago. When they stopped manufacturing it, he was forced to switch to Fuji 64D, with which he still feels unsure. At the 40th International Rotterdam Film Festival last month, Dorsky was invited for a retrospective of his work and was very pleased with the end result. Most notably his films have no sound. He wants them to be seen in absolute darkness, without interruptions and he had never had a projection as excellent as the festival one; "‌. it's more than heaven". Almost every day his show was sold out in a 150 seat cinema. He was there, reveling in watching the heavenly projection and talking about his films in his gentle and exquisite manner. He was not lecturing, but a young (and less-young) filmmaker would get so much out of his words that you could walk out of the theater and feel you learned something new about cinema and life. Nathaniel Dorsky work is sui generis: besides no sound, he uses very closeup images, play of light and dark plus a melodic editing structure. Short shots, one after the other for an average duration of 20 minutes each film. He started to explore his visual language when he was about 10 and took his father's 8mm camera. Since his adolescence, when he got serious about cinema, he has in essence made portraits of his surroundings, in particular Sunset, the neighborhood in San Francisco where he has been living most of his life. Dorsky considers himself an aging child. The whole series of films shown during the festival has definitely to do with what he calls "original"; the attempt of touching the heart of original vision. He started to make his films just exploring the world around him after he got seriously injured
in a car accident. He couldn't talk much, he couldn't enjoy conversation, he could only enjoy walking around with his camera. In order to find a strong motivation for starting to shoot, he wondered "‌ why did I do this originally, why did I do it? It was because I found things beautiful in the world - touching, and I wanted to take pictures of them and share them so I started and I just forgot all sense of being an avant-garde filmmaker. I went back to the primordial history of being a visual, mortal being. Probably an unexplainable thing". That led him to his original language, where cinema does what it wants to do, where each cut in itself is a poetic gesture, not representing anything else outside of it, not depicting humans and yet keeping the quality of being human. Referring to Basho's poetry technique and his rules on linkage - no A, B, A - Dorsky describes his experimental cinema form as a film that opens up towards its own needs in each moment, in each cut , rather than a film that is trying to create something external to itself, such as a place, an idea, a drama. His structure is very similar to the dream, in which you have an image that morphs like a cloud shape, and then a conceptual line clicks another idea, changes its shape and starts another idea. The dream continues from that transitory moment with a fascinating structural language. This way in a sense you end up having a film with which to dream, rather than to look at. Watching Nathaniel Dorsky's art films gives you a different perspective to look at things and opens up your sensorial perception. From his own words: "‌ when you have a human mind you can actually perceive that you perceive. To perceive that we perceive in a way is the seed of wisdom; it's the seed of a deep devotional sense of what it is to be human, the mystery of being a human being. That's what I'd like my films to be always about. So, to see the perceiver and what he perceives simultaneously in a union, I think makes for what I call a 'devotional' cinema". text by Marcella di Palo Jost, photo by Jerome Hiler