Nathaniel Dorsky Movies

Conceived and photographed with the loving collaboration of Susan Vigil during the last year of her life, Song and Solitude is balanced more toward...

“A brief lost moment lies between.” — Nathaniel Dorsky

September’s ripeness, a blessing on earth, our Indian summer.

San Francisco's winter is a season unto itself. Fleeting, rain-soaked, verdant, a brief period of shadows and renewal.

"Compline is a night devotion or prayer, the last of the canonical hours, the final act in a cycle. This film is also the last film I will be able to...

Dorsky’s three earliest works (made when he “entered the realm of poetic filmmaking as an active maker”), all sound films, with...

A dedication to Jane Wodening and an ode to the winter sun.

Norman’s father was a society portrait painter. After his father’s death, Norman faces the burden of inheriting his father’s...

"Lamentations is a cinematic tumble through diverse dreamscapes in a man-made world." —N.D.

"February was photographed during the first weeks of early spring in San Francisco. For me there is a haunted sense of restlessness in its form, some...

Ariel is a highly energetic and colorful divertissement of abstract film achieved with improvised home color processing and a physical, almost...

Emanations is the third film made during the COVID crises… in this case October and November reveal small joys in a melancholic sea.

Abaton, a sacred place, a sanctuary for dreaming and healing.

The fourth of the “cinematic songs,” followed by two new works “made by someone closer to passing on, by someone whose sense of...

Nathaniel Dorsky's Spring conjures an abundant return of light and a retreat into nature so dense and rich that the film itself becomes a sort of...

More than two dozen men and women of various backgrounds, ages, and races talk to the camera about being gay or lesbian. Their stories are arranged...

Colophon (for the Arboretum Cycle) has three sections. It is in the spirit of the early Chinese landscape colophons, a text added to the horizontal...

“Renga is a linked-verse form of Japanese poetry that, though still practiced today, reached its peak between the 13th and 16th centuries....

In the last few years I have been making a series of cinematic portraits of young filmmaking friends acting as collaborators in portraiture.There is...

Shot in San Francisco from autumn of last year through the winter solstice, Nathaniel Dorsky's Song evinces a cool, mysterious tone as it captures...