Blissfully Yours

What a fortuitous week to finally catch up with Nathaniel Dorsky’s portrait of San Francisco winter — “a season unto itself.” It screened with Song of Solitude and Sarabande last night at a sold-out Cinematheque presentation, and this morning the sun has reappeared after a long migration; a week’s worth of “chance of showers” shimmers the grass and plants which Dorsky animates with such intensity as to make me feel that I was “seeing” photosynthesis. Dorsky joked this was the first time he was introducing Winter to an audience (audibly rapt) who didn’t need an explanation of the variatel particular to Northern California. There are shots in Sarabande and Song of Solitude which capture the leveling Spanish light that sometimes washes over downtown San Francisco, leaving the impression of an interminable fresco; the close-ups of luminous clothing (red corduroy, checkered jackets) and leaves, in particular, invite a tactile vision, what San Francisco poet-teacher Bill Berkson described as “extreme seeing” in his introductary remarks. But the evocation of San Francisco winter, which is all intermittency, was rather more peripheral. Some shots do directly represent the miles of gray and rich plumage of clouds (e.g. a majestic sequence of five images of the gathering sky reflected by the hood of a car baring voluptuous raindrops) — but the feeling of the season was located in camera movements, blurred composition, centerless framings.

I could live here, I scribbled in my notebook during Sarabande; is there any doubt that Dorsky’s San Francisco is as much a place as Hitchcock’s? It may sound obsequious, but I find such original, intense visions of beauty to carry a similar charge as certain political documentaries (Profit motive and the whispering wind and An Injury to One come to mind). Lyricism and rhetoric, after all, are both meant to have a rousing effect; at their most elevated, they challenge us to see the world differently. They are good for living.

The three films themselves were elegant as expected, and drew some nice connections — geographical and formal — with the Warren Sonbert films kino21 screened last year. (An aside: Has anyone ever addressed the leitmotif of cats in experimental film, the natural affinity between felicity and the feline expressed in Sonbert & Dorsky’s work, as well as Stan Brakhage’s incomparable Cat’s Cradle?). Funny and full of wisdom, Dorsky said many remarkable things between films — about the screen’s needing to be alive when it’s not functioning as a stage; praising the elegance of silence; about finding the “soul” of Kodachrome in its lower color register; that 80% of his films are shot within walking distance of his apartment; his fondness for the play of neon, rain and glass in floral displays; his dislike of high white skies; of the “cross-dissolve” of sycamore leaves and blossoms in San Francisco winter — but there was one point I’d like to draw special attention to:

His description of viewing footage — a weekly ritual of picking up film, bringing it back to his apartment and projecting it straightaway. “There needs to be a screen,” he said of his editing-selection, a process he shared with his friend Susan Vigil during the last year of his life (the result is Song of Solitude). I like this image of filmmaking, as it implies a second layer of discovery and an unusual webbing of the filmmaker-audience perspectives, one which must be heightened by the bittersweet knowledge that no one else will see the film looking so beautiful as it does in that virginal run. This fact must influence Dorsky’s editing decisions which, like Sonbert, fleece the eyes, giving form and breath to a “passion for the lost chord” (Berkson’s opening remarks). Is this the root of the olfactory quality of Dorsky’s light? By limiting the films to the visual sense, he awakens the ones not usually accessed by film. Most of the time, sound + vision occupy us with enough verisimilitude to send our other senses into hibernation; to which Dorsky’s films would seem to say, What a waste.

In his introduction, Berkson promised that each of these films would make twenty minutes of our lives coherent, melodious, vibrant. Dorsky later told the audience that the films are “for you.” The ride home on BART was everything the films were not: stuffy, vexed with delay, vaguely annoyed, disinterested. But I could see it for what it was, and this lightened the load.

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More interesting Dorsky material here, here and here.

The PFA opens its Agnès Varda retrospective tonight with La Pointe Courte, from the very avant-nouvelle vague year of 1954. Varda is one of my deep favorites; Clèo from 5 to 7 and The Gleaners & I are unique peaks of films history as far as I’m concerned, and I’m still reeling from my first encounter with Le Bonheur last week. Like Dorsky’s films, it transmit vast melancholy in immaterial telegrams of color and weather.

~ by maxgoldb on March 7, 2009.