Winter
Nathaniel Dorsky screened four of his most recent 16mm silent films today.
After three whole layers of professorial introductions (it was playing at SVA, part of some thing about Kandinsky), the man himself took the podium, and charmed the pants off of everyone, talking shop about film stock and making jokes about film projection becoming a live performance, since all the machinery’s getting rickety.
Before the first of the four films started, he urged the audience to pretend that it was 1965, and “the summer of love is 3 years away:” it’s a heady time, and no one had cell phones.
The movies went Sarabande, Compline, Aubade, and Winter, the latter being the theme on which the previous three were said to be variations.
Being silent (save the conversation coming from the projection booth), non-narrative, and gorgeous, the movies all had meditative effects. I’ve had problems getting through experimental movies before, and how they’re often ugly on purpose, but these were baldfacedly beautiful, all but one shot in what was left of a dwindling Kodachrome supply.
Rather than seeming symbolic of much, or pointing towards anything outwards, the movies had the weird effect of being mostly internal triggers, more like smells in the memories evoked and music in the tonal shifts felt. I wrote down a word that may not be real but maybe should be: mnemofacient.
Dorsky said all of this, more or less, in his Q&A afterwards. I guess he’s been doing it for 50ish years, so he knows what’s up with his own work, but it’s always surprising to hear an artist talk about what they do and just agree, agree, agree.
One thing, “meaningfulness rather than meaning,” got at the memory-jogging feel of each new shot. Those flowers were from that time I’d forgotten I’d forgotten in some palace garden in Japan in the summer, that thick weedy branch whorl the view from the screen porch of my dad’s house one morning, when I woke up on the dewy futon at dawn.
I’m sure this has all been remarked before, but it’s still remarkable to see a movie with no pressing information to impart, just impressions to make. Somehow, without sound, that typical heartstring-puller, it tugged up and down, put me to sleep and jolted me awake. The closest I’ve ever been able to feel to religious is in the experience of pure awe, like the stage 1 belief theorized by some German guy whose name escapes me (and Google): you see the moon, or hear thunder, and think, “damn, must be divine.”
Some of Dorsky’s shots did that, showing a kind of abstract monumentality to things that gave a glow like I’d never been able to buy coming from a painted halo.
I worry, and am not sure why I worry, that I resort to an emotional response to art too frequently to match up with some fuzzy ideal of how a person should perceive and judge, but more often than not, emotion is all I have to go on.
In that regard, these movies seemed to accomplish and explain to me what I think that abstract painting was originally intended to do. These dumb stills I plopped in here on blog principle obviously don’t do any of this justice.
A footnote anecdote that could bear fruit:
Dorsky spoke about film stock as being like a lover, said he knew Kodachrome so well that he could know what anything would look like without even filming it, had become a human light meter.
Later, though, commenting on having to switch now that it’s dead, he said that the quality of the newer stock he’s using is making manmade stuff more appealing, while Kodachrome made nature look amazing, but the manmade seem trite.
What I know of the aesthetic of pop art, and kitsch, and all of that, seems rooted in the triteness of Kodachrome’s color balance applied to the manmade. Again, sure this has been done, but tracking the nostalgic impact of the baby boomers’ favorite film on the entire way American art/aesthetics now function could be interesting. And it’s already got a soundtrack.
