Sarabande. 2008. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 15 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
“Dark and stately is the warm, graceful tenderness of the sarabande” (Nathaniel Dorsky).
The Dreamer. 2016. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 19 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
“This year our mid-summer’s night was adorned with a glorious full moon. The weeks and days preceding the solstice were magically alive with crisp, cool breezes, bright, warm sunlight, and a general sense of heartbreaking clarity. The Dreamer is born out of this most poignant San Francisco spring” (Nathaniel Dorsky).
Lamentations. 2020. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 14 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
“Lamentations is a cinematic tumble through diverse dreamscapes in a man-made world” (Nathaniel Dorsky).
Epilogue. 2016. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 15 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
“Epilogue is the seventh film in the Arboretum Cycle, a descent into the dark damp earth, a period of dying” (Nathaniel Dorsky).
Ruling Star. 2019. USA. Directed by Jerome Hiler. 16mm. 23 min.
“For one thing, this was my first film using negative stock after a lifetime of shooting color reversal. This was a time when I had to open up to a greater freshness of purpose. I had to go forward into the unknown without a plan” (Jerome Hiler).
Total running time: 86 min.
Through widely varying means, Nathaniel Dorsky’s and Jerome Hiler’s filming and editing strategies aim to preserve their films’ inexhaustibleness, conjuring a world as pregnant with potential as life itself. Dorsky’s work has evolved from a “polyvalent montage” that opens up the film’s scope at every cut to a structure based on the development of sequences in a distinct setting. In the last decade, however, he more often combines both approaches, making distant images arc with others as the constellated words of a poem and balancing this open poetic expression with spiraling variations on a subject. The painstakingly lucid improvisations of Hiler’s somatic camera and his musical sense of editing, rich in rhythmic inflections, weld physical and psychological aspects that convert the screen into a mirror and a self-portrait of the mind.