Compline. 2009. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 18 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
“Compline is a night devotion or prayer, the last of the canonical hours, the final act in a cycle. This film is also the last film I will be able to shoot on Kodachrome, a film stock I have shot since I was ten years old. It is a loving duet with and a fond farewell to this noble emulsion” (Nathaniel Dorsky).
Interlude. 2019. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 11 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
“A brief lost moment lies between” (Nathaniel Dorsky).
Intimations. 2015. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 18 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
“The film explores the whole body of film, not just down the middle. This is all the way up and all the way down. To show all that film emulsion can do, in terms of luminosity and darkness and middle range and everything. I’m very aware that it’s still going through the camera so I’m letting film have its day, a lot by adjusting the aperture, opening and closing the lens during the shot” (Nathaniel Dorsky).
Words of Mercury. 2010–11. USA. Directed by Jerome Hiler. 16mm. 2010-2011 min.
“Words of Mercury moves from a stark Wintery world and slowly develops into a place of overgrowth and richness that is almost suffocating and which re-invites death” (Jerome Hiler).
Total running time: 72 min.
As their intimate relationship with the 16mm Bolex camera evolved through the decades, Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler never relented in the transfigurative exploration of visual phenomena. Both film poets rip the light’s spectrum open into emerging worlds of color and magmatic, starry shapes. However disorienting in their initial grasp, Dorsky’s images often deploy an abstract figuration that sparks an interim between the viewer’s conscious and subconscious. Hiler’s multi-layered imagery implodes the solidness of matter, and stained remnants of filmed reality immerge, as passing glances, into a visionary air. The stratified depth they both inflect on the screen, where focal point, figure-ground and spatial coordinates become undiscernible, is a sustained variation on the unthinkable abundance of perception.