Nathaniel Dorsky Movies

Abaton, a sacred place, a sanctuary for dreaming and healing.

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

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,"...

Norman’s father was a society portrait painter. After his father’s death, Norman faces the burden of inheriting his father’s...

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...

"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...

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...

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...

A bouquet from those final arid days of summer.

Perhaps the most delicately tactile in the series of four cinematic songs, Love's Refrain rests moment to moment on its own surface. It is a coda in...

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

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

"Temple Sleep was photographed and edited during the initial Virus lockdown. The fly casting pools in Golden Gate Park became a mind healing place...

In the last few years I have been making a series of cinematic portraits of young filmmaking friends acting as collaborators in portraiture.There is...

Summer in San Francisco is a dry and rainless season. The film, Summer, although photographed during this period of time, is not so much a...

"February was photographed during the first weeks of early spring in San Francisco. For me there is a haunted sense of restlessness in its form, some...

Before he impressed the literary world with his books, author Paul Bowles was a music composer, collaborating with the likes of Aaron Copland and...

September’s ripeness, a blessing on earth, our Indian summer.

An aubade is a poem or morning song evoking the first rays of the sun at daybreak. Often, it includes the atmosphere of lovers parting. This film 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,...