Ingreen. 1964. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 12 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
“Ingreen is a reflecting pool of the underwater involvement of a mother-father-son relationship” (Nathaniel Dorsky).
A Fall Trip Home. 1964. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 11 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
“Its images, which evolve in a rather unmagical sober suburb, are continually transcended and manipulated into a kind of epic haiku of superimpositions and textural weavings” (Jerome Hiler).
Summerwind. 1965. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 14 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
“The world is seen from a larger view” (Nathaniel Dorsky).
Two Personal Gifts aka Fool’s Spring. 1966–67. USA. Directed by Jerome Hiler & Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 7 min.
“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 was that the world itself, or life itself, could be the language of a film. That a film could be inside out, so to speak; that existence itself could become cinema” (Nathaniel Dorsky).
Hours for Jerome Part 1. 1966–70. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 21 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
Hours for Jerome Part 2. 1966–70. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 24 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
“This footage was shot and edited from 1966 to 1970 and then edited to completion over a two-year period ending in July 1982. Hours for Jerome (as in a Book of Hours) is an arrangement of images, energies, and illuminations from daily life. These fragments of light revolve around the four seasons” (Nathaniel Dorsky).
Total running time: 89 min.
At age 21, Nathaniel Dorsky completed three sound films that announced his startling potential as a maker of poetic cinema and as a young adult coming to terms with adolescence in 1950s suburbia. Ingreen, A Fall Trip Home, and Summerwind explore an evolving consciousness of family, sexuality and childhood memories, both sensual and traumatic, in a lush articulation of plastic superimpositions and modulated time. His film practice was forever changed after Jerome Hiler gifted him a 100-foot roll, Fool’s Spring, in which Dorsky discovered the blossoming of life and film in a silent expression freed from description and narrative. After this first revelation and for the next five years, he pursued an open-ended, projectless film exploration, gathering material “comparable to a painter’s plein air sketchbook,” which he edited a decade later in Hours for Jerome, his first exploration of an “open form of montage” and a loving offering to his life partner.
This screening may include flashing and flickering images that can impact people who are sensitive to blinking lights.