Follow us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter Watch us on Youtube Join the Archive Mailing List Read our Blog

UCLA Film & Television Archive and REDCAT present

A Quartet of Recent Films by Nathaniel Dorsky

Compline (2009)
April 20, 2012 - 7:30 pm
In-person: 
Nathaniel Dorsky.

"Watching Mr. Dorsky’s films is a joy."—New York Times

Working in film since his childhood, Nathaniel Dorsky has become established as one of this country’s pre-eminent masters of essential cinema. His works, which are characteristically 16mm and silent and regularly exhibited in major art institutions, are explorative, devotional observations of everyday scenes and situations, whose sensitivity to light, shadow, movement and time render the anecdotal and familiar as unfamiliar, revealing mysteries ever-present but seldom recognized.

This evening of new work by Dorsky concludes a two evening cycle co-presented with REDCAT. The REDCAT screening will take place on Monday, April 16 at 8:30 p.m. Please see www.redcat.org for more details.

Total running time: 68 min.


Sarabande (2009)

“Dark and stately is the warm, graceful tenderness of the Sarabande.” —Nathaniel Dorsky

16mm, color, silent, 15 min.

Compline (2009)

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 shoot on Kodachrome, a film stock I have shot since I was ten years old. It is a loving duet with and a fond farewell to this noble emulsion." —Nathaniel Dorsky

16mm, color, silent, 19 min.

Aubade (2009)

"An aubade is a poem or morning song evoking the first rays of the sun at daybreak. Often, it includes the atmosphere of lovers parting. This film is my first venture into shooting in color negative after having spent a lifetime shooting Kodachrome. In some sense, it is a new beginning for me." —Nathaniel Dorsky

16mm, color, silent, 12 min.

Winter (2008)

“San Francisco’s winter is a season unto itself. Fleeting, rain-soaked, verdant, a brief period of shadows and renewal.” —Nathaniel Dorsky

16mm, color, silent, 22 min.