Nathaniel Dorsky

Dorsky was born in New York City in 1943 and grew up in Millburn, New Jersey.[1][2] Growing up, Dorsky learned about Buddhism through attending study groups with his father.[3] He made 8 mm nature films inspired by Disney's True-Life Adventures series.[4] Dorsky attended Antioch College for a year before moving to New York City to study film at NYU.[2]

In New York, Dorsky was exposed to the local experimental film scene and made a trilogy of films about his childhood.[5] Shortly after premiering the first film of the trilogy, Ingreen, he met Jerome Hiler at the Film-Makers' Cooperative.[2]

Dorsky's partner Jerome Hiler in 2023

Dorsky and Hiler became romantic partners and moved to rural Lake Owassa, New Jersey. Dorsky continued shooting footage after leaving New York but stopped editing and releasing films for many years.[6][7] He won an Emmy Award for the film Gaugin in Tahiti: Search for Paradise which was directed by Martin Carr in 1967.[4][8][9] Dorsky and Hiler lived in New Jersey from 1966 until they moved to San Francisco in 1971.[6] After going to Los Angeles to work on the exploitation film Revenge of the Cheerleaders, Dorsky settled in San Francisco permanently. He served for several years on the board of the San Francisco Cinematheque.[10]

In the early 1980s, he edited his films from living at Lake Owassa to make Hours for Jerome, a two-part film structured around the seasons. He experimented with silent speed in making the film, and since then he has made silent films which are screened at a reduced frame rate.[4][6] Hours for Jerome was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2012.[11] Dorsky's other short films from the 1980s concentrated on the film grain, texture, and color.[6]

Dorsky co-directed the 1986 documentary What Happened to Kerouac? with Richard Lerner, director of Revenge of the Cheerleaders. Lerner brought him onto the project to shoot footage that would accompany tapes of Jack Kerouac reading his own poems. Dorsky has since continued working as a film doctor, particularly for documentary films supported by the Film Arts Foundation in San Francisco.[4]

Dorsky's next film was Triste, assembled from footage shot over the course of many years and released in 1996. It established his practice of polyvalent montage, marking what he called "the level of cinema language that I have been working towards."[4][7] He has continued to develop this style of editing in his later works.[6] In 2003 Dorsky published the short book Devotional Cinema, in which he discusses the experience of watching film and explores the link between art and health. He shot a series of seven films at the San Francisco Botanical Garden in 2017. The Arboretum Cycle features the natural light propagating through the arboretum's plants, with variations in focus and aperture size.[12]

Dorsky was a visiting instructor at Princeton University in 2008 and he has been the recipient of many awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship 1997 and grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, two from the Rockefeller Foundation, and one from the LEF Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the California Arts Council. He has presented films at the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Tate Modern, the Filmoteca Española, Madrid, the Prague Film Archive, the Vienna Film Museum, the Pacific Film Archive, the Harvard Film Archive, Princeton University, Yale University, and frequently exhibits new work at the New York Film Festival's Views from the Avant-Garde and the Wavelengths program of the Toronto International Film Festival. In spring 2012 Dorsky took actively part in the three-month exposition of Whitney Biennial.[13] The 2015 New York Film Festival honored his work with a thirty four film complete retrospective at Lincoln Center. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times listed this retrospective in second place in her list of the top ten films of 2015.[14]

Dorsky's films are available only as 16 mm film prints and are distributed by Canyon Cinema in San Francisco and Light Cone in Paris. Prints of stills from his films are available at the Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, and the Peter Blum Gallery, New York City.

Most of Dorsky's films are silent works roughly 20 minutes long.[2] They are projected at 18 frames per second, much lower than the 24 frames per second used for sound films. The reduced frame rate introduces a slight flickering effect that makes the images more abstract.[15][16] He works with a 16 mm spring-wound Bolex camera, which limits the length of his shots to no more than thirty seconds.[17]

Dorsky's compositions avoid over-determined images that rely on established symbols or meanings so that the audience constructs meanings while viewing.[5] His shots are generally static, arranged with a basic shot-cut-shot construction that forgo superimposition, cross-cutting, or recurring images.[6] Common subjects of his include foliage, bodies of water, reflective or clear surfaces, and passersby.[2] His editing process seeks to balance shots and cuts in a way that presents the content of the shots but cuts away from them to break immersion. His montage approach favors complex connections that accumulate over the course of multiple shots.[5]

Dorsky's work has been an influence on filmmakers including Timoleon Wilkins and Konrad Steiner.[18]

• Anker, Steve; Geritz, Kathy; Seid, Steve, eds. (2010). Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-24911-0.
• Brooks, Tim; Marsh, Earle F. (2009). The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946-Present. Random House Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-307-48320-1. Retrieved December 5, 2017.

• Official website
• Nathaniel Dorsky at IMDb 
• Nathaniel Dorsky on Canyon Cinema