Nathaniel Dorsky Movies

Carriage Trade was an evolving work-in-progress, and this 61-minute version is the definitive form in which Sonbert realized it, preserved intact...

Dark and stately is the warm, graceful tenderness of the Sarabande.

Variations is a 1998 American short silent avant-garde film directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. It is the second film in a set of "Four Cinematic Songs,"...

"A pastourelle and an aubade are two different forms of courtship songs from the Troubadour tradition. In this case, the film Pastourelle, a sister...

Threnody is a somber but luminous progression through a delicate articulation of earthly phenomena… an offering to a friend who died. It is...

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,...

“Renga is a linked-verse form of Japanese poetry that, though still practiced today, reached its peak between the 13th and 16th centuries....

An exploration of the cycle of life and the inevitability of passing.

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...

The psychological and emotional motivations of gay sexual fetish, especially relating to gay male teens maturing into men and their sexual exploits.

The first of two devotional songs. Part One of a set of Two Devotional Songs. “The Visitation” is a gradual unfolding, an arrival so to...

Primordial spring is in the air, all is tentative.

Stoned people, music, movement, fields.

17 Reasons Why was photographed with a variety of semi-ancient regular 8 cameras and is projected unslit as 16mm. The four image format gives a look...

Colophon (for the Arboretum Cycle) has three sections. It is in the spirit of the early Chinese landscape colophons, a text added to the horizontal...

“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...

"Compline is a night devotion or prayer, the last of the canonical hours, the final act in a cycle. This film is also the last film I will be able to...

“A brief lost moment lies between.” — Nathaniel Dorsky

Arbor Vitae is a gesture towards a cinema of pure being. Its atmosphere is haunted by the period in which it was shot, the year of 1999. Although the...

"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...