Devotional Cinema Click on Pic to buy from Amazon...
Nathaniel Dorsky is a San Francisco filmmaker who is interested in the quiet, meditative and transformative power film, and the way that, like prayer or mediation it can have an effect on the viewers health and well being.
His book, Devotional Cinema, is a short (54 pages) work that explores these themes with a focus on cinema, even though the greater message of the piece can be applied to any art or art making.
A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to attend a screening of a few of Dorsky’s works, at the Union Theatre at UWM. The screening, titled ” Three songs: Recent Films by Nathaniel Dorsky,” gave me a unique opportunity to experience the type of meditative work that Dorsky is known for.
The title of the screening was interesting in itself. Dorsky is known for working with silent films. The word song of course evokes music, and I was pleased to find that what I saw projected on the screen was, in a way, a kind of music… without notes, without sound.
Dorsky has often referred to his films as “poems.” …. this serves the pieces well as it evokes the rythyms and moods that the films create. Using the word songs suggests this in an even stronger way. And as I watched the “songs” I was able to enjoy them as just that.
The kind of music Dorsky makes comes from the variables in each frame. For example, instead of pitch, there is variation in depth. We are often looking upon images through things near, we may see a car traveling down a road through a dense thicket of vegitation, or objects with curtisns in the fire ground.. and then there are camera movents. Some swift, changing in different directions and along with the colors and textures the film begins to dance, like a symphony of vision that is so vivid you can almost hear it.
Of course, you can’t. Even so, with everything else going on the silence becomes such a part of the work that one can’t help but feel it was part of it’s creation. The silence becomes the contemplativeness, mindfulness and meditaion of the maker. A maker who, even in the fury of activity that was clearly immersed in a quiet and centered mode of creation. Zen filmaking that delivers a Zen film viewing, with a silece so deafening it almost makes a sound.
And in that silence you can feel connected with the maker, both in the act of creation, and the art of looking. You can feel connected with the people experiencing the films along with you, the sounds of breath, chairs creaking, and bodies shifting, until it all blends together, one experience shared between, maker, lookers and listeners, together during a powerful act of creation.
