NYFF. Nathaniel Dorsky.

"As he writes in his short book, Devotional Cinema (2003), Nathaniel Dorsky aspires to discover in film a way of 'approaching and manifesting the ineffable,'" writes Darren Hughes, introducing his interview with the filmmaker for the Auteurs' Notebook. "In recent years that has meant fixing his camera on the world around him, usually his adopted home town of San Francisco, and finding in its mundane details images of extraordinary wonder. His work counters what Peter Hutton, another practitioner of devotional cinema, calls the 'emotional velocity and visual velocity' of our times. Dorsky's films manage to shift our perception, making us more alive to the strange beauty of the physical world we inhabit."

"Bookending with representations of twilight - an opening shot of light transmitted through a foregrounding grating, and a closing shot of the sun setting below a line of tree - Nathaniel Dorsky's Winter and Sarabande convey forms of progression: a movement from dawn to dusk, shadow to light, grey tones to color, emptiness to space." Acquarello.

Earlier: Michael Sicinski.

Update, 10/17: David Phelps in the Auteurs' Notebook on Sarabande: "Carl Th Dreyer prudently attested that every cut, that every object on-screen is felt when there are few; likewise, Dorsky pares his images down to mostly shadows and single rays of light, smudged out of focus, so that these small surges of color are fully felt against the dominating black, tiny flickers felt against the dominating movement. At first. Then, in a burst, Dorsky gives his images over to three nature shots of reds and blues and whites..."

Posted by dwhudson at October 7, 2008 9:48 AM