Nathaniel Dorsky's Arboretum Cycle Is Light as a Feather

Poet-fans of experimental film have probably read Nathaniel Dorsky's Devotional Cinema, published by Lyn Hejinian's Tuumba Press in 2005 (now in its revised third edition). In the current issue of the Brooklyn Rail, Max Goldberg looks at Dorsky's recent group of poetic films, Arboretum Cycle, which "spans seven films and the arc of a year." "Elohim is followed by Abaton, Coda, Ode, September, Monody, and Epilogue (all 2017)" and "really this seven story mountain is the least monumental of epics. Each shot gives way, light as a feather, a quantum of pure presence." More:

The experience of watching the Arboretum Cycle in its entirety is in some very large sense stunning. It is also reinforcing, with two hours being ample time to take root and bear fruit in the quality of attention. Elohim becomes clarified as a kind of purification ritual, its exquisite stillness persisting into Abaton until an extraordinary gust of wind—and with it the thunderous applause of trees—sets us on our way. This flourish is of a piece with the crescendos that leave so many of Dorsky’s films on high, but the other films of the Arboretum Cycle merely take a short bow before making way for the next turn of the season. By Monody and Epilogue, it begins to feel that the forest is filming itself. (The fact that we see the arboretum alternatively as garden and forest speaks to the cycle’s free reign in the imagination.) Nothing so tangible as a diary, the Arboretum Cycle nevertheless conveys the human-sized happiness of Emerson’s “Circles:” “The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle.” Questions pertaining to both logistics and metaphysics lead back to the same place: the art practice as second nature.

Find the full review at the Brooklyn Rail.