devotional cinema, nathaniel dorsky

In Uncategorized on 9 December 2005 with no comments

“Many films are delicately subservient to an idea or theme and consequently the images are never allowed to exist as themselves. They illustrate a scripted, written reality or concept. Even if they are visual, they are self-consciously so. They represent another form, a literary one, rather than manifesting directly as vision. This subtle distortion of the vision-language hierarchy violates the primordial strength of what cinema has to offer. It flattens our reality and flattens our cinema.”

- Nathaniel Dorsky, from Devotional Cinema ( see link below)

I spent two nights at the cinema project watching the films of Nathaniel Dorsky. He was also there to speak about his work. A real treat. His camera (strictly bolex, 16mm) finds intmate moments where light plays on surfaces – a spider’s web, moving water, a glass door opening. Images that are very basic to cinema. But how these images are arranged and unfold is where his personal poetry lies. Often what we are seeing is obstructed by something in the foreground. The impulse of our eye is to find out what is hidden behind that curtain or branch, but then the obstructing thing becomes part of a two-dimensional surface of light. This creates a beautiful tension for the viewer. A balance between separating out representational objects, the language of reality, and seeing everything as a seamless whole.

Unfortunately, Dorsky’s films are not available as digital reproductions. He said that as soon as Stan Brakhages’ work came out on DVD, rentals of his films went down by 75%. But it is a shame that we can’t get copies of much avant-garde work. Especially the personal/poetic cinema that came out of the 60s. Like poetry, these films need time and repetition to be worked into consciousness. They need to be lived with. That is where the transformation happens. I also think the language of personal cinema is very relevant to the vlogosphere. We need models.

Another quote:

“Narrative film seems very clogged up, with almost no exceptions. It has no openness for me. I go to any narrative film, in recent years, and with almost every one, the lobby is more interesting than the film. Getting out of my car and walking to the theater is much more interesting, because at least I am alive in the present moment. These films are assuming a form, which is no longer really valid this moment in the human psyche. It’s a decayed form, which people are variously bending and twisting in very chic ways to look new, but the more freedom you take with it, the more old and tired it seems. But the avant-garde has the same problem. So much new avant-garde cinema is excessively graphic, or excessively formal. A lot of it is one-dimensional, just like the features, no different. The percentage of great features being made, and the percentage of great avant-garde film being made is the same, you know, small.”

- Nathaniel Dorsky (Village Voice interview, see below)

LINKS:
Devotional Cinema by Nathaniel Dorsky
Canyon Cinema, Inc.
Brakhage and Dorsky Hash Out the Realities of Poetic Cinema

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devotional cinema, nathaniel dorsky

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