Nathaniel Dorsky Movies

“For most of my life, my films have been the marriage of external circumstances as seen through the needs of my own psyche. There is no other...

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...

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

A monody is an ode sung by a single actor in a Greek tragedy, a poem lamenting a person’s death. In this case, the sixth section of the...

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

A strange autumnal in an empty world, a film of late autumn and ghostly presences.

Following a period of trauma and grief, the world around me once again declared itself in the form of one of the loveliest springs I can ever...

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

In his contribution to the On Art and Artists interview series, Nathaniel Dorsky (b.1943) begins by discussing his childhood love of the John Ford...

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,...

Shot in San Francisco from autumn of last year through the winter solstice, Nathaniel Dorsky's Song evinces a cool, mysterious tone as it captures...

A bouquet from those final arid days of summer.

Often I go out shooting with my Bolex in the park’s Arboretum. During the autumn and winter of 2003/2004 I would more than likely run into...

Terce is the sixth film made during the Covid crises… the yellow greens of spring at last… the beginning of a greater relaxation.

A Naos is the inner room of an ancient Greek temple in which the image of the deity celebrated by that temple is depicted (usually in the form of a...

"I have been wanting to make a shorter film in and about a briefer period of time. December was photographed during this often turbulent month and...

In the spirit of the times and my own growing older, a brief tip of the hat… (Nathaniel Dorsky)

The ever-presence of death.

Like a memory already gone, this place of life.