A Fall Trip Home
In celebration of our second year of programming we are delighted to focus on the early work of a filmmaker who we have found inspiring as viewers, programmers and artists. This month we turn our attention to the first three films of Nathaniel Dorsky, an artist celebrated for his subtle eye, his attention to film as a language and his meticulous editing. In addition to this early trilogy, we present Ariel, a rare film that finds him using hand-processing as a visual language.
Dorsky’s trilogy on adolescensce was made when he was twenty and twenty-one years of age before he moved from New York to San Francisco. The sensual Ingreen was shot by a twenty-year old Dorsky in his hometown of Milburn, New Jersey and suggests his wrestling with his sexuality and his sense of living in a closed environment. Summerwind and A Fall Trip Home also evoke summer life in Dorsky’s childhood hometown.‘Forgetting its psychological plot, A Fall Trip Home is a fine exponent of the intrinsic magical power of cinema. Its images, which evolve in a rather unmagical sober suburb, are continually transcended and manipulated into a kind of epic haiku of superimpositions and textural weavings.’ –Jerome Hiler
Ariel was made in a period when Dorsky was paying particular attention to the individual qualities of various film stocks (another film from this period, Pneuma, consists of fields of film grain of out-of-date film stocks, processed without being exposed). Under the tutelage of fellow film artist, Janis Crystal Lipzin, Dorsky learned and developed new hand-processing techniques to which he subjected this film. The result is Ariel, one of his more visually abstract but no less vibrant films—lush with colour and motion…a lovely complement to his emotionally compelling early trilogy.
Programme:
Ingreen, Nathaniel Dorsky, 1964, 16mm, USA, 12 minutes
A Fall Trip Home, Nathaniel Dorsky, 1964, 16mm, USA, 11 minutes
Summerwind, Nathaniel Dorsky, 1965, 16mm, USA, 14 minutes
Ariel, Nathaniel Dorsky, 1983, 16mm, USA, 16 minutes, silent
@ Gladstone Hotel, Art Bar | 1214 Queen St West
Monday March 21, 2011 | 7:30pm screening, $5 suggested donation