MAKING LIGHT OF IT

"Dorsky arrived on the New York scene with a trilogy of short films—Ingreen (1964), A Fall Trip Home (1964), and Summerwind (1965)—evocations of his childhood and adolescence in a New Jersey small town (Millburn).  Most obviously in Ingreen, but to some extent in A Fall Trip Home, we see Dorsky coming to grips with the combined excitement and terror of gay desire, in a cinematic form that recalls the psychodramas of the 1940s and 1950s.  Unlike the defiant early landmarks of what we now call Queer cinema—Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947), Jean Genet’s Un chant d’amour (1952), Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963)—Dorsky’s early films reflect what must have been the more usual adolescent experience of confronting gay desire during the 1950s and 1960s: Dorsky seems to make his way through small-town adolescence with a guilty sense that he’s diªerent from his family and friends, and full of puzzlement about what to do about this.  

By the time he made Summerwind, Dorsky had become fascinated with a new form of cinematic perception: an intense looking at the particulars of the physical world that, in the years that followed, would mature into a series of remarkable visual experiences: Hours for Jerome, Parts 1 and 2 (1982), Pneuma (1983), Alaya (1987), Triste (1996), Variations (1998), Arbor Vitae (2000), Love’s Refrain (2001), The Visitation (2002), and Threnody (2004).  The visual sensibility of Dorsky’s mature films, all of which are silent (Dorsky asks that they be projected at eighteen frames per second, what he calls “sacred speed”), tends toward the spiritual, the meditative. Implicitly Dorsky asks that viewers consider the successive shots in his films not as parts of a strategy for delivering viewers to a narrative or ideological conclusion, but as an opportunity for becoming more fully aware of the particulars of each image and its interrelationships with the images that precede and follow it. Dorsky’s films are a form of visual/conceptual training in apprehending the world, and its representation in cinema, in a deeper, more reverent sense."

(Scott MacDonald in A Critical Cinema 5)

-


---

(my thanks to Nathaniel Dorsky, Chris Gehman, Steve Polta, Chuck Kleinhans, Roger Bebee and Joel Wanek for their assistance)

---

---

From Brakhage Scrapbook: Collected Writings:



---

From Film at Wit's End... by Stan Brakhage:



---

(from Film Culture No. 45):



---

(from Film Culture No. 63-64):



---

Excerpts from Movie Journal... by Jonas Mekas



---

Excerpts from The Garden in the Machine by Scott MacDonald





---

(from Grey Room Summer 2009)



---

Excerpt from Women's Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks:



---

Excerpt from Women and Experimental Filmmaking:



---

Excerpt from FilmWise No. 5-6 :



---

(Lights)

---

MENKEN ON FILM/VIDEO:

Canyon Cinema
Film-makers' Coop
Notes on Marie Menken (film)
Notes on Marie Menken (DVD w/four shorts)
Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film, 1947-1986

---

(Glimpse of the Garden)

---

INTERVIEWS:

(from FilmWise No. 5-6):



---


(all frames via Anthology Archives)
---

"Mostly people I love, for it is to them that I address myself.  Sometimes the audience becomes more than I looked for, but in sympathy they must be my friends.  There is no choice, for in making a work of art one holds in spirit those [that] are receptive, and if they are, they must be one's friends."
(Marie Menken)

---