Three of a Kind or the Subtlety of Silence, on "Three Songs" by Nathaniel Dorsky

Song and Solitude. There are grasses in extreme close-up. There are ripples in a pond and doors opening. There are cityscapes or humanscapes, but mostly both; however, this is the case when there isn't landscape. One thing the writer is sure of, there is lots of sound, it was just hiding behind Dorsky's soundtrack career choice: silence. There should have been the sotto melody carried on the breeze through the grasses, the secrect passed among the ripples in the pond, the tenured complaints of the door hinges, the mechanical longing of cars passing. The negative space created by the idle speakers hangs around the images like cigar smoke in the rain; the Union theatre was draped in a velvet emptiness that drew the eye to screen, held it there, absorbed it.

The absence of a soundtrack laid the laurels of the filmic experience entirely on the shoulders of image. The images shifted silently, sometimes unnoticed by the writer, between spaces and times and lighting conditions and subjects. Where a softly focused tree branch would be unrecognizeable beyond slashes of darkness across a dim frame, the film would quietly progress through other images of nature in the city before returning to the same image only more focused or the same subject but pulled back. Like the music form suggested by the first noun of the title, Song and Solitude returns to visual, same or similar shots, before shooting off to explore other ideas related to the refrain. Where the rippling pond or the blurred, dead branches anchored the film, the city scapes or other nature shots explored the reaches of their silent world. This structure of verses and refrain created a meditative atmosphere, induced a meditative state in the writer, the viewers. The images, striking, were given a new light as the viewer was asked to block all audio and simply look. Even those bustling city shots of patrons entering and leaving a coffee bar, cars sitting at a stop light were given a gravity of isolation. The solitude of the title is one of peacefulness: The viewer is alone in the theatre but far from lonely.

Winter. Winter in Dorsky's San Fransico is not the winter of the writer's Milwaukee: A heavy icing frosts the city; flakes of snow dance and spin around the corners of buildings; wind howls at the University, causing students to step lightly across the frozen sidewalks and brown, slushy intersections. Dorsky's Winter is quiet, despite the silence of the soundtrack. A thundercloud in silhouette, framed by two buildings of SF's skyline, is not dramatic or imposing. It is impressing and comforting. When the rain of this winter comes as it must, there is little falling beside the physical action. The droplets seem to hang in the frame, the viewer's mind. The silence does let let this rain, this winter, become frantic or isolating.

However, it is not the physical, actual, silence that comforts the audience into a state of contemplation and rapt. But, the artist's projection choice of silent speed, 18 f/p/s, when the footage was all shot at 24 f/p/s, causes an imperceptible floating. Each of the images in this and all of Dorsky's work (all shot and projected at the aforementioned speeds, respectively) has a gravity to it, as the event or movement of the shot unfolds at a speed fractionally-slower-than-real time. Those shots that are familiar from the first piece, or foreshadow the refrains of the third, carry with each the atmosphere of silence and a slow-motion flicker. However, that gravitational pull one feels toward Winter is not unique, neither are the images, nor the editing. Indeed, both the technical and contextual elements of Winter are exactly the same as those found in Song and Solitude and Sarabande, as well as those found in the Alaya or Triste.

Sarabande. A traditional Latin-via-Baroque dance lends its name to the third film in this trilogy. The latin version of this is a triple time performance that blends the 3 and 4 beats of a measure to cause a rhythm unique to the dance. European culture adopted this technical anomaly, slowed it down to revel in the beauty that one variation to a typical dance can birth. And Sarabande similarily is slow and revelatory. Again, many of the images are shared with the previous two pieces, but there is a technical variation. The editing puts the images, whether of nature or of civilization, in different orders, causing the content of each to interact differently. These pieces both draw on and illustrate Eisenstein's montage theory: the content of each shot contains an individual meaning, but the points at which each is conjoined creates a larger meaning.

Every shot in this program, Three Songs, could stand alone and have a resonance and specific meaning. But, Nathaniel Dorsky has put these images into very different orders, causing their edited associations to arouse in the viewer a understanding of his/her world that could not have been achieved in any other way. These three films were made at different points in the artist's life, giving each a unique meaning. Sarabande is a very different portrait of a place in time from that of Song and Solitude, even though it shares technical and content elements. This is the power of cinema, the pairing of such concrete things as images and technical strategies to create such personal and subjective experiences. This is a power that is not fully understood until the final piece has spun through its tail. The cumulative effect is of three pieces so frustratingly similar that they could not be more dissimilar. As an argument about this power of cinema, a soundtrack could only have felt contrived and manipulative.