Hours for Jerome

United States

1982

45 Min

Color

English

Currently 5.0/5 Stars.
1
2
3
4
5

|

ED Nathaniel Dorsky

Rotterdam (Signals: Dorsky)

Synopsis

Convincing return to filmmaking after more than 10 years’ absence is a cinematic succession of the seasons inspired by the Medieval Book of Hours.

This footage was shot from 1966 to 1970 and edited over a two-year period ending in July 1982. Hours for Jerome (as in A Book of Hours) is an arrangement of images, energies, and illuminations from daily life. These fragments of light revolve around the four seasons. –Nathaniel Dorsky

Director

Nathaniel Dorsky

In a way, Nathaniel Dorsky (1943) could be seen as one of the ‘classic’ American avant-garde filmmakers, although he is a relatively late developer within this group.

Dorsky works with great care, filming on 16mm and projecting at 18 frames per second: ‘sacred speed’, as he calls it. He has not used sound since his very first films. The films are screened in silence, to focus all attention on the images: stunningly beautifully shot, silent and striking. The images do not refer to a subject the viewer is expected to recognize but stand completely alone.

Dorsky’s oeuvre consists of twenty short films, each of approx. 10 to 30 minutes. The Toronto film festival recently showed his new, lyrical films Aubade, Compline and Pastourelle (2010) in its Wavelengths programme. In his book, Devotional Cinema, published in 2004, Dorsky explains his vision of the transformative power of watching films, his influences and philosophy, related to Buddhism… read more