Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Film (16mm)
Website: nathanieldorsky.net
Nathaniel Dorsky was born in New York City in 1943 and began making films in 16mm in the early 1960s, during the era of the New American Cinema. In the mid-1960s he met the filmmaker and artist Jerome Hiler, who became his life partner; the footage Dorsky shot of their daily life between 1966 and 1970 later became Hours for Jerome (1982), which the Library of Congress selected for the National Film Registry in 2012. Alongside his own work, Dorsky worked as a film editor, and he won an Emmy Award in 1967 for his work on the documentary Gauguin in Tahiti: Search for Paradise.
Dorsky and Hiler moved from New York to San Francisco in 1971, and both have lived and worked there ever since. He has presented his films at the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, the Filmoteca Española, the Austrian Film Museum, the Harvard Film Archive, and the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, and his work was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2000 and 2012. The first complete retrospective of his films was shown at the 53rd New York Film Festival in 2015, in a joint program with Hiler’s work. The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) serves as the archive of record for both filmmakers’ films.
Dorsky has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, two Rockefeller Foundation grants, and support from the LEF Foundation, the California Arts Council, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2006). He was a visiting instructor at Princeton University in 2008. He is also the author of Devotional Cinema, a short book on film and spiritual experience.
Dorsky makes silent 16mm films, shot to be projected at 18 frames per second, and he insists that they be screened in silence. His films are built from everyday images, often of San Francisco: light on leaves and water, passersby, storefronts, reflections, and the changing seasons. They avoid narrative in favor of what he calls “polyvalent montage,” in which each shot stands on its own and resonates with the shots around it rather than advancing a story. He has described the goal as a film form that in itself has the qualities of being human: “tenderness, observation, fear, curiosity.”
His work is often discussed in devotional or meditative terms, and he groups many of his films into cycles, among them the “Quartet” (Triste, Variations, Arbor Vitae, Love’s Refrain), the “Late Films” (including Sarabande, Compline, and Aubade), and the Arboretum Cycle (2017), seven films shot in Golden Gate Park and edited over the course of one year.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.