Nathaniel Dorsky

Nathaniel Dorsky (born 1943) is an experimental filmmaker and film editor who has been making films since 1964. He intends that his 16mm silent films "create a state of prayer" not by treating Buddhism as a subject but by expressing "the view that comes from Buddhism".

Dorsky was born in New York City, attended Antioch College and New York University, and has lived in San Francisco since 1971.

In his book Devotional Cinema (2003), Dorsky writes of the long-standing link between art and health as well as the transformative potential of watching film. He also writes of the limitations of film when it is subservient to theme or dependent on "the ornament of language", which can describe a world but not see it. According to critic and historian Richard Suchenski, in Dorsky's films objects are “decontextualized and sometimes unmoored from their surroundings, allowing connections to develop which resonate not only between shots but also across the films as a whole, encouraging more active forms of awareness.”^[1]

Dorsky was a visiting instructor at Princeton University in 2008 and he has been the recipient of many awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the LEF Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the California Arts Council. He has presented films at the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Pacific Film Archive, the Harvard Film Archive, and Yale University, and he frequently exhibits new work at the New York Film Festival's Views from the Avant-Garde and the Wavelengths program of the Toronto International Film Festival.

His films are distributed by Canyon Cinema in San Francisco and Light Cone in Paris.

Filmography

• Ingreen (1964)
• A Fall Trip Home (1964)
• Summerwind (1965)
• Hours for Jerome Part 1&2 (1980–82)
• Pneuma (1977–83)
• Ariel (1983)
• Alaya (1976–87)
• 17 Reasons Why (1985–87)
• Triste (1974–96)
• Variations (1992–98)
• Arbor Vitae (1999-00)
• Love's Refrain (2000–01)
• The Visitation (2002)
• Threnody (2004)
• Song and Solitude (2005–06)
• Winter (2007)
• Sarabande (2008)
• Compline (2009)
• Aubade (2010)
• Pastourelle (2010)

References

1. ^ http://www.yaledailynews.com/scene/film/2008/11/14/devoted-to-devotional/

External links

• Canyon Cinema
• Light Cone
• Ed Halter Interview with Dorsky and Stan Brakhage
• Link to information on Devotional Cinema, reflections on film written by Nathaniel Dorsky
• Link to ART FORUM: "Tone Poems" by P. ADAMS SITNEY Article on the films of Nathaniel Dorsky, November 2007, PDF
• Interview with Dorsky by Scott MacDonald
• Nathaniel Dorsky at IMDB
• "about Nathaniel Dorsky" collected online articles, documents, comments and news, about and by filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky

Persondata
Name	Dorsky, Nathaniel
Alternative names
Short description	Filmmaker, film editor, author
Date of birth	1943
Place of birth
Date of death
Place of death