the startlingly beautiful silent films of Dorsky and the music of octurn, in dialogue

Nathaniel Dorsky (USA, 1943) is a poet of the analogue medium. He has been walking around for decades with his 16 mm camera and is recognized as a master of colour and grain in the tradition of his fellow artists Stan Brakhage and Gregory Markopoulos. The sheer beauty of his images reveal the sensuality of the material world. The self-existing magic of the things captured on his films suggest a mysterious and luminous world or as he describes in his book Devotional Cinema: “we suddenly see a hidden world, one that has existed all along right in front of us. In a flash, the uncanny presence of the poetic and vibrant world, ripe with mystery, stands before us.” His images seem no longer to belong to our digital age. Till this day his work remains unavailable on DVD and is a gem to discover on 16mm. In order to prevent all distraction from being in the moment of seeing, his films are screened in silence and often at the speed of 18 frames per second, the ‘sacred speed’ and also the speed of silent cinema.