The Devotional Cinema of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler

Programmed by: Hannah Yang and Jackson Zaro

"Intermittence penetrates to the very core of our being, and film vibrates in a way that is close to this core." In his book Devotional Cinema, filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky identifies the feeling of illness or health that follows experiencing certain films, and locates as the cause a film's ability to "mirror and realign our metabolism." For example, the intermittent quality of light in film projection is not unlike our natural vision or the way we experience life (with gaps and moments of the unknown). Similarly, we watch films in a dark cinema like we watch the illuminated world "from the dark theater of our skull." Dorsky and his partner Jerome Hiler have developed this theory of cinema alongside a filmmaking practice that is equally concerned with our chemical relationship to film. Experiments with in-camera editing, spontaneity, beautifully layered superimpositions, polyvalent form, silence, and silent speed projection (at 18 frames per second) define some of their work. As Dorsky aptly describes it, the films involve humans beyond mere depiction by creating a form that has human qualities and characteristics. One gets the sense that the films are alive; watching the film turns into conversing, thinking, and breathing with the film. Focusing a sensitive attention on cinema and its unique qualities, Dorsky and Hiler have created a body of work which spans their early experiments of the 60s to new films today — films that uncover simultaneously elemental and unknown things in the world to us in breathtaking, moving ways. The nature of celluloid and the art of its presentation is deeply integrated into their work — the necessity of the cinema to these films, and these films to the cinema, lays the ground for a devotional experience.

All prints courtesy of Canyon Cinema.