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Nathaniel Dorsky

Nathaniel Dorsky

Director

Raised in New York on a steady diet of Westerns and Disney True-Life Adventures, Nathaniel Dorsky started shooting 8mm movies at the age of eleven. In 1963, when he had just turned 20, he made Ingreen, a boldly symbolic psychodrama about a young man’s sexual coming of age. At that film’s premiere, he met soon-to-be fellow filmmaker Jerome Hiler, who would become his partner in life and a major inspiration for his work. (“We were filming for one another,” Hiler recently said.) In 1971 the two moved to San Francisco, where they’ve lived ever since. Around the same time, Dorsky entered a decade-long creative silence. He returned in 1982 with Hours for Jerome, a 55-minute feature compiled from footage shot between 1966 and 1970. Like all of Dorsky’s subsequent work, it’s a kind of cinematic lyric poem, entirely silent and rooted in a centuries-old tradition of devotional art (in this case, medieval illuminated manuscripts and prayer books). The rest of the Eighties found Dorsky experimenting with new forms and materials: 1987’s Alaya was made up entirely of footage of shifting sand, and 1983’s Ariel, which had a rare public screening at this year’s New York Film Festival, is a beautiful hand-processed film full of thin, tremulous vertical lines and see-sawing horizontals. It was with 1996’s Triste—edited from over 20 years’ worth of footage—that Dorsky, as he once put it, fully arrived at “the level of cinema language that I have been working towards.” Since then, he’s made 16 luminous, description-defying short films, each with their own distinct tones and shadings. In films like Compline (09), August and After (12), and his two most recent titles, Spring and Song, Dorsky creates what he’s often called a “floating world,” in which street scenes, household interiors, meadows, rivers and forests are transformed into playgrounds for light, color and shadow. In a field often dominated by frenetic cutting and/or prolonged stasis, Dorsky’s films unfurl gradually but steadily in a kind of hushed suspension. They’re often attempts to do with light and texture what, in his book Devotional Cinema, Dorsky praised Mozart for having done in key changes and melodic lines: to “wed [a] style to the human metabolism in every detail".

Born: January 1, 1943 (Age 81) in New York City, New York, USA

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Nathaniel Dorsky  Movies & TV Credits

Title Rating Job Role(s) Year
Movie
7.3
ActorDaniel1989
Movie
7.8
Actor1982
Short Film
6.8
ActorHimself1978
Short Film
9.1
Actor2012
Movie
4.6
DirectingScreenplay, Director of Photography, Producer, Story1976
Movie
6.8
EditingEditor, Co-Producer1986
Movie
7.8
DirectingDirector1982
Movie
7.2
EditingEditor, Cinematography2000
Movie
8
EditingEditor2004
Movie
7.8
EditingEditor2010
Movie
DirectingDirector
Movie
DirectingDirector, Director of Photography, Editor
Movie
DirectingDirector, Director of Photography, Editor
Short Film
5.5
EditingAssociate Editor1995
Short Film
6.5
DirectingDirector2006
Short Film
7
DirectingDirector, Director of Photography, Editor, Producer2012
Short Film
6.7
DirectingDirector2008
Short Film
7.1
DirectingDirector2009
Short Film
6.7
DirectingDirector2010
Short Film
7.3
DirectingDirector2008
Short Film
DirectingDirector2000
Short Film
8.5
DirectingDirector2002
Short Film
7.4
DirectingDirector, Writer1996
Short Film
6.7
DirectingDirector1998
Short Film
7.4
DirectingDirector2010
Short Film
EditingEditorial Production Assistant2014
Short Film
7.7
DirectingDirector2018
Short Film
7.2
DirectingDirector2004
Short Film
6.8
DirectingDirector1987
Short Film
7.1
DirectingDirector1983
Short Film
DirectingDirector1964
Short Film
DirectingDirector2013
Short Film
8.1
DirectingDirector2017
Short Film
DirectingDirector2012
Short Film
DirectingDirector2019
Short Film
DirectingDirector2018
Title Rating Job Role(s) Year
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