No filmmaker more joyfully and succinctly embodies the poetry of the medium than Nathaniel Dorsky. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Dorsky has been making experimental films since 1963. His films are silent and use the intimacy of that silence to draw us deeper into the subtle beauty of his images. Luminous combinations of shapes and light fill the screen, revealing the mysteries of our everyday life and offering glimpses of the sublime. His films are shot and screened exclusively on 16 mm, so screenings are rare events. Few have been as lucky as I was when, on an afternoon in January 2023, after a bite of exquisite dark chocolate, I was led through a trapdoor in his living room, down a set of stairs into the darkly glowing sanctuary where he edits his films, and treated to a private screening of two new works: Dialogues and Place d’or, the latter of which he had finished tweaking just the night before. As the projector began to roll and Dorsky’s images filled the wall at eighteen frames per second, the medicinal quality of his work immediately took hold. 

In Dialogues, the first film he screened, flowers, branches, and other similar forms shimmered with a vibrant fragility, becoming sculptural beings that communed with one another within the frames. About halfway through the piece, the projection darkened completely, until I noticed a milky-white swirl in the upper-left-hand corner. Suddenly, the whole screen brightened and a clear image of the Pacific Ocean emerged: the milky-white swirl became a foggy summer sky balanced above equally murky water. Shot at a diagonal, a solitary oil tanker could then be seen moving across the horizon, slowly making its way toward the bay. The clarity of this image, its devastating grays juxtaposed with the abstraction of the previous cut, thrust me into a bardo-like confusion. It felt akin to what the first viewers of North by Northwest must have felt when the crop duster swoops down from the sky and begins flying directly toward an unsuspecting Cary Grant. The image stayed with me until days later, when, in a dream, I found myself on a beach, a giant whale’s tail rising from the water, threatening to crash down on me and my umbrella through the foggy sky.