Threnody

United States

2004

25 Min

Color

English

Currently 4.8/5 Stars.
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ED Nathaniel Dorsky

Rotterdam (Signals: Dorsky)

Synopsis

An offering to influential filmmaker Stan Brakhage, made shortly before his death, which gives him a final look at earth.

Threnody is the second of two devotional songs, the first being The Visitation. It is an offering to a friend who died. –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