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Jerome and Nathaniel will be celebrated at MoMA and Anthology Film Archives this month of May.

This ten program mini retrospective is to celebrate the publishing in English of a new book on the early years of their filmmaking titled Illuminated Hours, The Early Cinema of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler.

There will be seven hosted in person programs in New York at MoMA followed by three in person shows at Anthology Film Archives. This selection of films will open with Jerome Hiler’s slide lecture, Cinema Before 1300. The emphasis will both be on the early formative explorations and a selection of their later work from the last six years or so. Many new films will be screening in NY for the first time.

The series is online here; MoMA and Anthology Film Archives will be finalizing their screening schedules and updating their calendar pages. 

Nathaniel on the left, 1944, with his grandfather in the Bronx Botanical Gardens. Jerome on the right with his godfather, 1944, Jamaica, Queens

MoMA calendar link Anthology Film Archives calendar link

Illuminated Hours: The Early Cinema of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler, by Francisco Algarín Navarro & Carlos Saldaña. English edition managed and edited by Nick Hoff. ISBN: 978-8-4940-9766-9

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Nathaniel's Caracole (for Mac) to premiere on March 16 at the Museum of the Moving Image

Caracole (for Mac) is part of the First Look film festival at the Museum of the Moving Image on Saturday, March 16th at 3:00 p.m. in New York City. This group show is the avant-garde showcase within the festival and will take place in the Redstone Theater beginning at 3 pm, titled, Illuminations: Elsewhere/Here.

Caracole (for Mac)

Nathaniel Dorsky  |  2022  |  7 minutes  |  silent speed  |  18fps  |  16 mm  | color  |  silent 

Mac McGinnes, a dear friend and neighbor, often sat in with me during my editing sessions. This brief but light-filled farewell was made for Mac upon his passing.  N.D.

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Film Still: O Death

O Death Nathaniel Dorsky I 2023 I 5.5 minutes I silent speed I 18 fps I 16mm I color I silent In the spirit of the times and my own growing older, a brief tip of the hat…  N.D.  

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Will Epstein interviews Nathaniel Dorsky for The Believer magazine

Musician, Will Epstein, visited me in my apartment on a sunny San Francisco afternoon and we had a humorous and enjoyable conversation. The interview was published by The Believer Magazine, issue one hundred forty-three, October 11th, 2023.

link  for An Interview with Nathaniel Dorsky

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Jerome Hiler to be celebrated at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California

The PFA will host four shows and lectures by Jerome Hiler this early autumn at the Berkeley Art Museum. 

Show one: Wednesday, September 13th, 7pm, Three Experimental Films, Program One

Show two: Sunday, September 17th, 4:00pm,  Lecture: Cinema Before 1300

Show three:  Sunday, October 1st, 4pm, Three Experimental Films, Program Two

Show four:  Saturday, October 28th, 4pm, Music Makes a City    

link Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive monthly calendar for more details

link Illuminations by Jerome Hiler at BAMPFA

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Film Still: Caracole (for Izcali)

Caracole (for Izcali)

Nathaniel Dorsky I 2023 I 17.5 minutes I silent speed I 18 fps I 16mm I color I silent

In the last few years I have been making a series of cinematic portraits of young filmmaking friends acting as collaborators in portraiture.There is always a surprise as to what the Bolex reveals of a person that is not revealed with the naked eye.This happened in a very strong way with Jacob while shooting Pavane. But I was not prepared for the surprise that took place when I looked through the camera at Linda. I suddenly saw her as never before and asked without hesitation if she were Aztec. She responded enthusiastically that indeed she was, in fact, her middle name is Izcali, after the important Aztec festival month of rebirth.  N.D.

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Film Still:  Caracole (for Cecilia)

Caracole (for Cecilia)

Nathaniel Dorsky I 2019 I 4 minutes I silent speed I 18fps I 16 mm I color I silent

Caracole (for Cecilia) is the first in a brief series of small personal gifts.  It was made in celebration of the first birthday of Cecilia, the daughter of Antonella Bonfanti, who for many years managed Canyon Cinema in San Francisco.  N.D.

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Film Stills: Pavane

Pavane Nathaniel Dorsky I 2023 I 11.5 minutes I silent speed I 18fps I 16 mm I color I silent How often and varied we come upon ourselves in this brief life. This film of early spring is a second made in collaboration with Jacob, a young filmmaking friend who also appeared in Naos.  N.D.

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Film Still: Place d’ Or

Place d’Or Nathaniel Dorsky  |  2023 | 10 minutes  |  silent speed  |  18fps  |  16 mm  | color  |  silent A rainy autumn afternoon at North Lake in Golden Gate Park. Perhaps the “Square of Gold" is also the screen itself.  N.D.

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Film Still: Dialogues

Dialogues Nathaniel Dorsky  |  2022  | 17.5 minutes  |  silent speed  |  18fps  |  16 mm  | color  |  silent The ever-presence of death.  N.D.

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Film Comment Podcast interview of Nathaniel and Jerome discussing the New York years 1962 to 1964

Image from a film by David Brooks, Letter to D.H. in Paris

LINK:  Audio podcast

Film Comment

Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler on NYC's Underground Cinema

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Film Stills: Naos

Naos Nathaniel Dorsky  |  2022  | 12 minutes  |  silent speed  |  18fps  |  16 mm  |  color  |  silent

A Naos is the inner room of an ancient Greek temple in which the image of the deity celebrated by that temple is depicted (usually in the form of a statue of that deity). Jacob, a young filmmaker, offered to help me with some shooting and became the center of the film itself.  N.D.

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Film Still: Caracole (for Mac)

Caracole (for Mac) Nathaniel Dorsky  |  2022  |  7 minutes  |  silent speed  |  18fps  |  16 mm  | color  |  silent

Mac McGinnes, a dear friend and neighbor, often sat in with me during my editing sessions. This brief but light-filled farewell was made for Mac upon his passing.  N.D.

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William, by Nathaniel Dorsky will world premiere on March 19th

William is presently scheduled to premier as part of the First Look film festival at the Museum of the Moving Image on Saturday evening, March 19th in New York. This group show is the avant-garde showcase within the festival “First Look” and will take place in the Redstone Theater beginning at 9pm, titled, Persistent Visions II.

William Brown, the son of my dear friend, Owsley Brown, is majoring in acting at the University of Southern California. During the lock down we ventured out three times together to Golden Gate Park to enjoy playing movies, so to speak. We decided on the loose framework of depicting a day on LSD, lost in a forest of noir-ish lighting, and inspired by our mutual love of Nicholas Musuraca and John Alton, two very great directors of both low budget and more mainstream cinematography.  N.D.

William Nathaniel Dorsky  I  2020  I  12.5 minutes  I  silent speed  I  18fps  I 16mm  I black & white  l  silent

William, Persistent Visions II    Museum of the Moving Image Festival                                     First Look 2022     

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Nathaniel Dorsky: Shimmering Golden Music

Extract from Notebook Interview Article and interview with Nathaniel Dorsky by Maximilien Luc Proctor   A conversation with the American experimental filmmaker on the occasion of a Barcelona retrospective of his and Jerome Hiler’s films and a new book about them both. 

Over the course of ten programs across five days in Barcelona this January, curators Francisco Algarín Navarro and Carlos Saldaña presented a career-spanning series devoted to American experimental filmmakers Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler. The series was curated to coincide with the release of a brand-new book, Illuminated Hours. Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler, focused on the pair’s early years; meeting and struggling to understand the elusive medium of film. As is the case for all Lumière publications, it is a beautiful object, complete with full-color stills and archival documents. The bulk of the book consists of extensive interviews with Dorsky and Hiler conducted by Navarro and Saldaña, and features texts by curator Mark McElhatten among many others, and incorporates excerpts from prior interviews, including one I conducted with Hiler for Ultra Dogme last year. Illuminated Hours is currently only available in Spanish, with an English language version slated for later this year. 

As Dorsky and Hiler exclusively screen their work directly from 16mm prints (rentable from Light Cone in Europe or Canyon Cinema in the U.S.), there were only two individual exceptions to this rule. Library (1970) was screened as a digital file, from a 2021 restoration by the Harvard Film Archive. A collaboration between the two filmmakers, Library is based on the old style “industrial”, highlighting the various community benefits of its namesake. Dorsky’s 17 Reasons Why (1985-87) was screened once from a print and was available to watch on a four-monitor (one for each of the 8mm frames shown simultaneously) constellation on a loop, from a 2020 digital scan done by MoMA. It is a delightfully playful whirlwind (I’m thinking here of a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it composition where Dorsky films his pants around his shoes while sitting on the toilet)  which condenses the visual beauty from across his filmography into a metabolism more often associated with the work of someone like Joseph Bernard. Apart from his fascination with photographic beauty formed through dense reflections and thick, high contrast plays of striped shadows silhouetting over brightly sunlit people and objects, Dorsky often holds a shot until time allows itself to unfold so that a surprise may surface. They are simple surprises, but ones that often bring about great pleasure; take three women seen through a window, all wearing deep red clothing. When one changes position, she reveals a bottle of ketchup in their midst, perfectly suited for the occasion. When we are presented with a collection of minute glimmering lights, we wonder for a moment where they might originate, until Dorsky turns the aperture to reveal they are light reflected in the droplets on the hood of a car. In Love’s Refrain (2000-2001), a clear plastic to-go box is opened by the wind, leans backwards, and its own contents (a lonely plastic fork and styrofoam cup) slide into the center, forming a new arrangement for this found statue. It is an image in conversation with the plastic bag floating in the wind of Variations (1998). There are beautiful rippling lights seen in macro, manifested as out of focus orbs, ruptures of the universe, shimmering golden music. 

Through Dorsky’s polyvalent montage he hopes that certain shots will be taken as reverberations of ones previously seen within a film—the edit is arranged intuitively yet strategically. The larger body of work supports and re-amplifies so many reverberations across the decades; Jerome Hiler appears numerous times throughout, as do endless bushes, shrubs, saplings and veteran trees. Text silhouetted and thrown onto unusual surfaces, human behavior when unaware (one presumes) they are being observed. Perhaps most fascinating are the infrequent yet recurring interludes of three to five shots of rapid movement through dense cross hatcheting created by shooting through an orange construction fence or by simply filming similarly shaped shadows intersecting with stairs—thrilling in their velocity within the context of such steady and measured work. Dorsky is interested in geometry and its permutations through movement, be they such rapid ‘stackings’ or the languid vibrations of nature reflected on the pulsating surface of a pond. So too do certain ideas reverberate across the pair’s collective body of work, though in less obvious ways. Where Hiler works with multiple exposures to overlap, echo, and strike lightning, Dorsky achieves his density of image in a single shot, with concrete, recognizable photography—we understand the literal images but not always the how or what of their surroundings. When we see a “pseudo-Hellenic bust” (to borrow from P. Adams Sitney’s apt description) lying on its side in Dorsky’s Threnody (2003-2004), it comes back to mind when we see the face of a similar figure in Hiler’s Words of Mercury (2010-2011), surrounded by a barren rural area in the background. In both cases the old world has fallen. Dorsky presents us with texts being written or copied down (by Hiler), but Hiler presents text itself (one screen-filling superimposition close-up of German text makes legible the name “Maria Rilke”). Hiler also creates text through the scratching of the film surface, such as in the notes he scrawls onto Marginalia. Immediately after stepping out of a Dorsky screening, some images remain in the mind’s eye with power, others vanish almost instantaneously—not for lack of visual virtuosity, but for their settling somewhere deeper in the mind than what is accessible on the surface. A few hours later certain images would return, but what truly astounded me was a shot which came to mind with complete clarity the following afternoon when I happened upon its analogous manifestation in the physical world: Dorsky’s camera careening into the flowers, leaning in closer to catch a pollinating bee, startlingly yellow in a sea of lavender, obstructing pedals pressed forward by the lens as it passed...

The entire Mubi Notebook article “Nathaniel Dorsky: Shimmering Golden Music” including the Maximilien Luc Proctor interview with Nathaniel Dorsky, is available online.

continue reading on     Mubi homepage

Illuminated Hours. Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler    Lumière

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Video Data Bank presents Jeffrey Skolar interviewing Nathaniel Dorsky at the Chicago Art Institute, May 5th, 2000

I’ve known Jeffrey Skoller since the early eighties in San Francisco as a filmmaker before he also became a professor. The Interview was done in Chicago in 2000. I had just made "Variations” and showed it in Chicago for almost the first time publicly. 

Nathaniel Dorsky: An Interview

2000 | 57 min | United States | English | Color | Video | edited in 2014

Part of the Series: Video Data Bank On Art & Artists: Media. Start watching with your public library card or university login.

Platform streaming   Kanopy

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Illuminated Hours: The Devotional Cinema of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler, ten screenings in Barcelona

Between January 13 and 17, 10 screenings dedicated to the film work of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler will take place in Barcelona. The film retrospective, "Illuminated Hours: The Devotional Cinema of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler", organized by Francisco Algarín Navarro and Carlos Saldaña, will be celebrated in three different venues: Xcèntric, the cinema of the Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, the Catalonian Cinematheque and ZumZeig Cinema. In addition to these screenings, between January 13 and 30, the Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona will present the installation version of Nathaniel Dorsky's film 17 Reasons Why. The film cycle also includes a special screening on Sunday 15 in which the film Library will be shown, made in 1970 by Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler on the New Jersey public library network, along with the presentation of a new book, Illuminated Hours. Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler, a publication edited by Francisco Algarín Navarro and Carlos Saldaña dedicated to more than forty years of shared life and filmmaking, and the reprint of the Spanish version of Devotional Cinema, both with the Spanish publishing house Lumière.

The program includes the following screenings:

Program 1 Xcèntric, the cinema of the Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, Thursday, January 13, 7pm Apricity, Nathaniel Dorsky, 2019, 16 mm, silent, 22’ Lamentations, Nathaniel Dorsky, 2020, 16 mm, silent, 14’ Ember Days, Nathaniel Dorsky,  2021, 16 mm, silent, 10’ Emanations, Nathaniel Dorsky, 2020, 16 mm, silent, 16’ Terce, Nathaniel Dorsky, 2021, 16 mm, silent, 16’

Program 2 Catalonian Cinematheque, Friday, January 14, 4:30pm Ingreen Nathaniel Dorsky, 1964, 16mm, sound, 12’ A Fall Trip Home Nathaniel Dorsky, 1964, 16mm, sound, 11’ Summerwind Nathaniel Dorsky, 1965, 16mm, sound, 14’ Hours For Jerome Part 1 & 2 Nathaniel Dorsky, 1966-70/82, 16mm, silent, 45’ Program 3 Catalonian Cinematheque, Friday, January 14, 7:30pm In the Stone House Jerome Hiler, 2012, 16mm, silent, 35’ New Shores Jerome Hiler, 1987, 16mm, silent, 35’ Bagatelle II Jerome Hiler, 2016, 16mm, silent, 20’ Program 4 Catalonian Cinematheque, Saturday, January 15, 4:30pm Pneuma Nathaniel Dorsky, 1983, 16mm, silent, 28’   17 Reasons Why Nathaniel Dorsky, 1987, 16mm, silent, 20’ Alaya Nathaniel Dorsky, 1987, 16mm, silent, 28’ Program 5 Catalonian Cinematheque, Saturday, January 15, 7:30pm Triste Nathaniel Dorsky, 1996, 16mm, silent, 18’ Variations Nathaniel Dorsky, 1998, 16mm, silent, 24’ Arbor Vitae Nathaniel Dorsky, 2000, 16mm, silent,  28’ Program 6 Xcèntric, the cinema of the Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, Sunday, January 16, 12pm Library, Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler, 1970, 16 mm to digital, 17’ Presentation of the publication “Illuminated Hours. Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler” and the Spanish version of “Devotional Cinema”  Program 7 Xcèntric, the cinema of the Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, Sunday, January 16, 6:30pm Love’s Refrain, Nathaniel Dorsky, 2000-2001, 16 mm, silent, 22’ Threnody, Nathaniel Dorsky, 2003-2004, 16 mm, silent, 20’ The Visitation, Nathaniel Dorsky, 2002, 16 mm, silent, 18’ Program 8 Xcèntric, the cinema of the Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, Sunday, January 16, 8pm Words of Mercury, Jerome Hiler, 2010-2011, 16 mm, silent, 25’ Marginalia, Jerome Hiler, 2016, 16 mm, silent, 23’ Bagatelle I, Jerome Hiler, 2016-18, 16 mm, silent, 16’ Ruling Star, Jerome Hiler, 2019, 16 mm, silent, 22’ Program 9 ZumZeig Cinema, Monday, January 17, 7pm Sarabande, Nathaniel Dorsky, 2008, 16mm, silent, 15’ Compline, Nathaniel Dorsky, 2009, 16mm, silent, 18’ Aubade, Nathaniel Dorsky, 2010, 16mm, silent, 11’ Winter, Nathaniel Dorsky, 2007, 16mm, silent, 18’ Program 10 ZumZeig Cinema, Monday, January 17, 9pm The Return, Nathaniel Dorsky, 2011, 16mm, silent, 27’ August and After, Nathaniel Dorsky, 2012, 16mm, silent,18’ Intimations, Nathaniel Dorsky, 2015, 16mm, silent,18’ April, Nathaniel Dorsky, 2012, 16mm, silent, 26’

All films listed as silent will be shown at silent speed, 18 frames per second, except for 17 Reasons Why which ideally should be shown at 16 frames per second as it is in the digital installation.

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