It is my pleasure to announce to you, oh devoted readers, that Nathaniel Dorsky, avant-garde filmmaker and film theorist, will be screening a variety of his films at The Whitney this week. Dorsky (who currently lives in San Francisco) was born in 1943 in NYC, and attended Antioch College and NYU. His piece, “Devotional Cinema” has been hugely influential to me, an exploration of the meeting of film and religion/metaphysics, and the idea of film as devotional practice and projection. 

Kathleen Tyner (author of Literacy in A Digital World), writes here of this book as follows: “Devotional Cinema, reprised from filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky’s lecture on religion and cinema at Princeton University, is a rare treasure of penetrating insight into the language of film. In a compelling style, somewhere between a Zen koan and a Victorian love story, Devotional Cinema makes the case for mindful viewing as a transcendent experience. In the process, Dorsky reflects upon the role of filmmaking in faith, prayer, pleasure, and the renewal of the human spirit. For Dorsky, the material nature of film illuminates a path to devotion. Devotional Cinema is a guide for makers and viewers who, like Dorsky, seek the ‘elemental glory’ of film.” 

I highly recommend it, and I hope to see you at The Whitney this week. 

In my films the screen itself is transformed into a speaking character, and the images themselves function as pure energy rather than secondary symbols. The montage does not lead to verbal understanding, but is actual and present like this statement held in your hand. The narrative is that which takes place between the viewer and the screen. By delicately shifting the weight and solidity of the images, and bringing together subject matter not ordinarily associated, a deeper sense of meaning can manifest.

My films are silent because silence allows the viewer to feel these delicate articulations of vision, which are simultaneously poetic and sculptural, with a personal freedom and intimacy.

“It is the direct connection of light and audience that interests me. The screen continually shifts its dimensionality from being an image-window, to a floating energy field, to simply light on the wall. …Silence allows these articulations, which are both poetic and sculptural at the same time, to be revealed and appreciated.”