Nathaniel Dorsky Movies

A document from the weeks that Stan Brakhage was dying of bladder cancer. Dominic Angerame, then head of Canyon Cinema, and I went up to Victoria,...

Light in the gardens of the San Francisco Arboretum, photographed in early spring. Elohim are divine beings, the energy of light as creation.

The fourth of the “cinematic songs,” followed by two new works “made by someone closer to passing on, by someone whose sense of...

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

Before he impressed the literary world with his books, author Paul Bowles was a music composer, collaborating with the likes of Aaron Copland and...

Look Park presents close up shots of a country stream viewed in bright sunlight. The film opens with wide shots of the park to establish the location...

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

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...

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

These four films spontaneously manifested as four stages of life: childhood, youth, maturity and old age. Elohim was photographed in early spring,...

The ever-presence of death.

An aubade is a poem or morning song evoking the first rays of the sun at daybreak. Often, it includes the atmosphere of lovers parting. This film is...

Epilogue is the seventh film in the Arboretum Cycle, a descent into the dark damp earth, a period of dying.

After a lifetime, two mutual friends, George Kuchar and Carla Liss, passed away during the same period of time.

The first of two devotional songs. Part One of a set of Two Devotional Songs. “The Visitation” is a gradual unfolding, an arrival so to...

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

“The title Apricity refers to the warmth of the sun in winter. It is an homage to the writer Jane (Brakhage) Wodening. In speaking to her I...

Norman’s father was a society portrait painter. After his father’s death, Norman faces the burden of inheriting his father’s...

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...

In 1948, a small, struggling, semi-professional orchestra in Louisville, Kentucky began a novel project to commission new works from contemporary...