This Friday at 7 PM, Northwestern University’s Block Cinema will host one of the major cinematic events of the year with the local premiere of The Arboretum Cycle (2017), a collection of seven interconnected short works by veteran avant-garde filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky. One of the country’s most important living film artists, Dorsky has been making meditative, generally rapturous movies since the early 1960s. He has described his practice as “devotional cinema” (he also wrote a book with that title in 2003), referring to the potential of movies to engender spiritual experiences. The Arboretum Cycle is doubtless one such experience. Shot in the San Francisco Arboretum over the course of a year, the work consists of silent shots of plant life, skies, and other natural phenomena. Dorsky’s compositions are consistently inspired; eschewing wide shots, he forces viewers to lose themselves in minutiae. Last week I telephoned the filmmaker (who will attend Friday’s screening) to discuss the cycle. Our far-ranging conversation came to touch upon spirituality, the ethics of editing, and what it’s like to be a plant.
I think that course was called “Film in Search of a Language,” because I said that the most interesting thing to me about experimental film was the search for an intrinsic film language. I wasn’t so interested in the “naughty” films or the extremist films. I was interested in ones that actually began to find some union between the essence of cinema and the ability to express something with that essence that wasn’t based on theater or poetry. . . . Later, I got a chance to give a lecture at Stanford, just in a classroom, and I gave a talked that condensed [my course] into an hour-and-a-half-long talk. I called it “Montage and the Human Spirit,” because it was an editing class that I was speaking in front of.
Cutting a film is very much like being a good lover or a good host. You offer something—not too much, not too little—and you’re aware of what’s going on in [the viewer’s] mind. Sometimes after a preview screening, I’ll trim some shots by, like, four frames, because I realize [the film] is just starting to get self-conscious. I’m beginning to go from the present moment into a secondary analysis moment. So I like to try to cut before the mind begins to decay into self-consciousness. . . . The montage should come out of the inner necessities of the work itself.
Can you talk about the significance of these titles, Elohim and Abaton?
Yes, very much so.
Oh yes. I have many films that have images from there. It’s in walking distance from my apartment. It’s a lovely place to hang out—it’s like a sanctuary. You feel safe there. Like, you can leave your camera on a tripod, walk 20 feet away and look at something and know that nobody’s going to run off with it. It’s a wonderful place to have a toke, you know. There are benches. . . . You can have the freedom to stand and stare at a plant for a few minutes without feeling strange or like you’re outside of the social order.
