POV Award: Nathaniel Dorsky

Description

The Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award honors a filmmaker whose main body of work falls outside of the realm of narrative feature filmmaking. For more than 50 years, Nathaniel Dorsky has been illuminating minds with experimental, silent short films in which light, nature, and everyday surrounds are carefully captured and combined to prismatic, alchemical effect. Don’t be confused by his impressive list of commercial (and independent) film credits for editing; his primary career is as a film visionary. In his 2003 book, Devotional Cinema, he writes about film viewing with the same delicacy and intimacy he uses to create brilliance in the medium itself when he says, “In a flash, the uncanny presence of the poetic and vibrant world, ripe with mystery, stands before us.” Dorsky has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship, screenings at MoMa, the Tate, and Whitney Biennial, but as Max Goldberg writes in Cinema Scope, such appellations are beside the point. “Once engrossed in Dorsky’s silent cinema… the social world of reputation is suspended for the encompassing and intrinsically solitary experience of beauty.” Join us for this conversation with Nathaniel Dorsky and screening of four recent short films.

Nathaniel Dorsky: Four Films
Avraham, USA 2014, 20 min / Intimations, USA 2015, 18 min / Autumn, USA 2016, 26 min / The Dreamer, USA 2016, 19 min. 
The last months of a San Francisco drought year brought about Autumn (2016), while The Dreamer (2016) was born out of San Francisco spring. In accompanying text to stills of Intimations (2015), Dorsky notes “how delicately light imbues our fleeting life,” and that Avraham (2014), was not named after the fact as many films are, but before shooting – and the word acted as the film’s inspiration.