still from Triste, 1974-1996 by Nathaniel Dorsky
Don’t miss out on the Nathaniel Dorsky film screening happening at MoMa this Thursday night at 8:15pm (the program repeats on Saturday evening at 5pm).
Dorsky is an avant-garde artist and filmmaker from San Francisco. His sublime images are some of the most beautiful and intimate I’ve ever seen captured on film. Weaving exquisitely filmed moments into personal visual poems, films such as Hours for Jerome, Pneuma, and Alaya are unlike anything you’ve seen before. They all share a tremendous sense of awe and astonishment when looking at the world.
In Pneuma from 1977-1983 Dorsky weaves together an imaginative tone poem of shifting film grain. To create the dancing grain, he photographed out-dated raw film stock that had been processed without being exposed. Dorsky’s grain dances and moves across the screen like a mob scene of collected dust particles. I never would have thought that such a mesmerizing film of sand could exist.
Dorsky’s perceptive view is deep and penetrating, creating an overwhelming and wondrous view of life seen through the camera.
The word “devotion,” as I am using it, need not refer to the embodiment of a specific religious form. Rather, it is the opening or the interruption that allows us to experience what is hidden, and to accept with our hearts our given situation. When film does this, when it subverts our absorption in the temporal and reveals the depths of our own reality, it opens us to a fuller sense of ourselves and our world. It is alive as a devotional form.
-Nathaniel Dorsky from his book Devotional Cinema, 2003
The MoMa schedule.
Buy the book Devotional Cinema by Nathaniel Dorsky.
Read an interview with Nathaniel Dorsky and Stan Brakhage. Interesting part about the plastic bag.