Nathaniel Dorsky Movies

Compilation of footage shot from 1974-96, developing on Dorsky's theory of polyvalent editing.

Threnody is a somber but luminous progression through a delicate articulation of earthly phenomena… an offering to a friend who died. It is...

"I have been wanting to make a shorter film in and about a briefer period of time. December was photographed during this often turbulent month and...

Variations is a 1998 American short silent avant-garde film directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. It is the second film in a set of "Four Cinematic Songs,"...

17 Reasons Why was photographed with a variety of semi-ancient regular 8 cameras and is projected unslit as 16mm. The four image format gives a look...

The psychological and emotional motivations of gay sexual fetish, especially relating to gay male teens maturing into men and their sexual exploits.

A document from the weeks that Stan Brakhage was dying of bladder cancer. Dominic Angerame, then head of Canyon Cinema, and I went up to Victoria,...

Dark and stately is the warm, graceful tenderness of the Sarabande.

In his contribution to the On Art and Artists interview series, Nathaniel Dorsky (b.1943) begins by discussing his childhood love of the John Ford...

Primordial spring is in the air, all is tentative.

"A pastourelle and an aubade are two different forms of courtship songs from the Troubadour tradition. In this case, the film Pastourelle, a sister...

The first of two devotional songs. Part One of a set of Two Devotional Songs. “The Visitation” is a gradual unfolding, an arrival so to...

All the Kodachrome footage chosen to be worked with to make the film Song and Solitude during years 2005 and 2006. During that period I still had the...

“A brief lost moment lies between.” — Nathaniel Dorsky

An exploration of the cycle of life and the inevitability of passing.

“For most of my life, my films have been the marriage of external circumstances as seen through the needs of my own psyche. There is no other...

Like a memory already gone, this place of life.

Perhaps the most delicately tactile in the series of four cinematic songs, Love's Refrain rests moment to moment on its own surface. It is a coda in...

Look Park presents close up shots of a country stream viewed in bright sunlight. The film opens with wide shots of the park to establish the location...

Colophon (for the Arboretum Cycle) has three sections. It is in the spirit of the early Chinese landscape colophons, a text added to the horizontal...