Nathaniel Dorsky Movies

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...

During a tour with my films in Spain last spring, I had the pleasure of being honoured with the attention of three young people who offered me the...

Like a memory already gone, this place of life.

Summer in San Francisco is a dry and rainless season. The film, Summer, although photographed during this period of time, is not so much a...

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...

"Compline is a night devotion or prayer, the last of the canonical hours, the final act in a cycle. This film is also the last film I will be able to...

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...

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...

"Lamentations is a cinematic tumble through diverse dreamscapes in a man-made world." —N.D.

Ariel is a highly energetic and colorful divertissement of abstract film achieved with improvised home color processing and a physical, almost...

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...

Dorsky’s three earliest works (made when he “entered the realm of poetic filmmaking as an active maker”), all sound films, with...

Stoned people, music, movement, fields.

Arbor Vitae is a gesture towards a cinema of pure being. Its atmosphere is haunted by the period in which it was shot, the year of 1999. Although the...

Conceived and photographed with the loving collaboration of Susan Vigil during the last year of her life, Song and Solitude is balanced more toward...

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

Dorsky’s three earliest works (made when he “entered the realm of poetic filmmaking as an active maker”), all sound films, with...

This year our mid-summer’s night was adorned with a glorious full moon. The weeks and days preceding the solstice were magically alive with...

Sand, wind, and light intermingle with the emulsions. The viewer is the star.

A personal travel film shot in Oaxaca and then in France and Italy.