Anthology Film Archives is currently hosting the Walking Picture Palace, an annual avant-garde film showcase which this year includes “Illuminated Hours and Days,” a round-up of recent work by Nathanial Dorsky. Program 1, which includes his films Sarabande and Winter among others, screens tonight.
Winter is the 20-minute companion piece to Dorsky’s Eisensteinian/Mahlerian Sarabande, which mounts like a double helix out of dialectical clashes in color, speed, location, and abstraction/figuration as it builds twining strains. Winter is more traditional, horizontal lieder accelerating fluidly through a San Francisco Indian Summer refocused to single strains of light and sudden bursts of clarity.
The film looks shot day-for night, and often like Dorsky’s held a flashlight to an underground civilization, so that time, season, city and country are already in sickly dissolve; Dorsky’s abstractions—silhouettes, liquids, and window reflections—make it seem like the simple play of light could wash them away. In Dorsky’s comedy, the city is an enclosed playhouse with a view onto the galaxy; repeatedly Dorsky emphasizes living things that look like toys (someone’s body, face unseen, and a dog that looks stuffed gazing cockeyed at the cosmos) and toys that look alive (an extended magic lantern show). The effect is a sleep-walking city moving unconsciously to a dance, the rhythm as always in Dorsky’s crescendos of light and montage. Where Sarabande ends portentously on its opening shot, Winter finishes in a frantic burst of roses, as though there’s no way to grasp these things but the last, most insignificant shot, is let to spin on in the imagination.
DP– I saw this, based on your rec. It was amazing and everything you said aesthetically is so correct. Thanks for never leading astray. But I think you have seasonal dyslexia. Why did you write that a film called “Winter” is about Indian Summer? And it ends in quince blossoms, which mark the tip of spring, not pre-summer roses. Oh I know– because Summer is cold and dry and brown in San Francisco, and winter is the green, fertile season–dark green shadowed winter solstice light. Hard to conceive of for anyone from outside. Dorsky, from the East Coast, said the film is about his awe of this inverse.
“Oh I know– because Summer is cold and dry and brown in San Francisco, and winter is the green, fertile season–dark green shadowed winter solstice light. Hard to conceive of for anyone from outside. Dorsky, from the East Coast, said the film is about his awe of this inverse.”
That’s as good an answer as I could give.