LINEAR PERSPECTIVE: Nathaniel Dorsky

Conventional wisdom conflates the modern filmmaker with the modern novelist, as both are assumed to fill the role of storyteller. For the typical moviegoer, it’s understood that a film moves forward on the axis of narrative. Equally fundamental is the notion that the viewer consents to that narrative. For Nathaniel Dorsky—an experimental filmmaker, professional film editor, and film essayist—these rules impose unnecessary constraints on the freedom of the process. Instead, he says, the very idea of the moving image implies a sort of narrative.

“Film is a narrative form. Something is laid out and builds upon it continually,” Dorsky says. The viewer has no prescribed conceit, no narrative to give consent to. Narrative construction imposed by a director—a “controller”—is regressive. “When the controller is not there, then your mind likes to relax and become itself,” Dorsky says.

On Dec. 5th, Dorsky appeared at the Harvard Film Archive to present three of his montage-oriented, silent film shorts. His two most recent, “Sarabande” and “Winter,” were both made this year and were shown adjacent to an older piece, “Alaya,” composed of material from between 1976 and 1987. When audio problems—little more than the faint white noise of inactive speakers—interfered during the initial viewing of “Sarabande,” Dorsky suggested the film be shown again at the conclusion of the program so that audiences could experience the piece without interference. Dorsky clearly intended the viewing experience to be completely undisturbed.

“Sarabande,” the first film shown, was a montage of clipped, obscured, and often beautiful passages ranging in focus from anonymous people in transit to flowers and vegetation. More frequently than not, it was unclear exactly what the objects were—whether because the shot was too tight, too dark, or simply with too foreign a subject—leaving the viewer with little more than free-associative and mnemonic inference. But this is all part of Dorsky’s vision.

“The whole idea is to set up tension that you as the viewer synapse the completion of,” Dorsky says.

“Alaya,” the oldest of the three, is distinct from the program’s bookends, focusing on the strangely captivating, almost hypnotic qualities of sand. The subject of every shot is either a macroscopic—an entire desert vibrating in the wind—or a microscopic—singular grains tumbling one over the other—perspective of sand. The grains themselves complement and enrich the grain-like quality of film, and the bluish filtering that Dorsky builds through use of internegatives gives each frame an alien, otherworldly quality.

“Winter,” the companion piece to “Sarabande,” is a meditation on San Francisco (home both to Dorsky and the Canyon Cinema collective he’s a member of) in winter. The San Francisco winter is a period of rainfall and subsequent rejuvenation—dark, confused, populous, and ready to blossom again. One of its concluding passages explores a bundle of cherry blossom stems wrapped in plastic—one moment among many where Dorsky uses unconventional angles and framing to make the banal, well, beautiful.

It’s a good word for describing Dorsky’s work. Aesthetically, his passages are stunning, and their sheer beauty would risk descending into sentimentality were it not for the vacuum-like silence that accompanies each of his films.

“I realized that once I adjusted to the silence, that the cinema had a chance to articulate in a way that sound film didn’t,” Dorsky says. The absence of any sound at all erases what seems to be, for him, an extraneous context that limits the viewer’s ability to become a part of the experience. “Spatially, you can torque the film in a muscular way—contract, expand, release—in a way that’s in tune with the psyche.” Dorsky says, referring to silent films.

Unlike his influences Dziga Vertov and Bruce Conner, whose work veered into social and political commentary, Dorsky seems more concerned with the level to which the individual viewer participates in the film’s meaning. Dorsky says, “Hopefully, if it’s successful, subject matter, screen, and the audience aren’t separated by concept.”

Dorsky has penned one acclaimed work on film theory—“Devotional Cinema”—where he expands upon an approach to filmmaking that encapsulates his vision. Between screenings, he discussed the concept of “place”—that of a film bringing the viewer to a new place through description—that he struggled with as his career brought him to cinema.

Ultimately, it was the poetry of John Ashbery that led him to ask, “What would it be like to make a film that is the place?” For Dorsky, that new place is the dialectic between the artist’s labor and the well of the viewer’s imagination.

—Staff writer Ryan J. Meehan can be reached at rmeehan@fas.harvard.edu.