In the spring of 2017, after the first wet winter in many dry years, Nathaniel Dorsky walked with his Bolex through Golden Gate Park’s arboretum and noticed the blooming plants. Dorsky’s way of noticing often yields short experimental films of consecrated silence, in which attention becomes ceremonial. In this case, the plants took well both to drought relief and to being noticed, and eventually Dorsky had a series of seven films collectively titled the Arboretum Cycle.
As he explained to Artforum in 2019, “I didn’t want to make a film that depicted a garden or plants or flowers, but one where the film itself became like a plant that could fill with light. I began to let the aperture function in a way that paralleled the expressions of mood in the psyche. I could feel as a breeze was coming into the garden, and I would open the lens and let it fill with light, using the Bolex like a clarinet, and then I would feel in my own psyche fear or sadness, and darken the aperture, and then restart toward some hope of finding light again.” These staccato and legato visual phrasings are as essential to the work as the film stock it’s recorded on, and he understands the result may be an acquired taste.
“My garden’s boundaries are the horizon,” Derek Jarman famously said about his own creative and botanical dominion in the windswept shingle of Dungeness. A world away, Dorsky claims a kindred inversion of that philosophy, tucking introspectively into his thickets and luminous slipstreams with equally resourceful attunement to the seasonal atmospheres of San Francisco. The Arboretum Cycle is literally a shining example of his singular practice. As films, they’re formally similar to each other but almost hermetically unlike anybody else’s. As caves of art-historical echoes, they’re wide open: a twitch of focal plane here, and pastoral impressionism melts into modernist abstraction; an exposure ramp there, and what at first suggests dusky Botticellian treetops suddenly gives off the frisson of an Andy Goldsworthy earthwork. All within a few otherwise unassuming square feet of Golden Gate Park—who knew?
It’s fun imagining some ragtag band of Dorsky fans on a low-key arboretum pilgrimage to pin down exactly where this magic happened, but of course where it really happens is a light rectangle in a dark room, bouncing noiselessly between emulsion grains and rods and cones and synaptic networks. Dorskian noticing is sharable and San Francisco seasons may even be infinite, considering how, as the artist put it in his book Devotional Cinema, “pure nowness transcends the passage of time.”
Arboretum Cycle plays Saturday, August 29, as part of the series “Nathaniel Dorsky & Jerome Hiler: Film Offerings at BAMPFA.” Dorsky will be in attendance.
