A refrain of effusive adjectives tends to accompany the recent films of Nathaniel Dorsky, whose four decades of filmmaking has reached a prolific and prosperous peak. One of the most gifted 16mm filmmakers of our time, Dorsky is known for camerawork that is precise, sensitive and rapturous, demonstrating enchantment and fascination with the everyday. His films are both silent and projected at silent speed, allowing for an experience of what he terms “the flickering threshold of cinema’s illusion.” His book, Devotional Cinema, explores the relationship between filmmaking and spiritual transcendence. Suffused with longing, Dorksy’s three latest films, Compline, Aubade and Pastourelle, partake in this project, wherein the plasticity of the medium is met by the artist’s consummate expression and physical surroundings. Arresting in its twilight beauty, Compline is the final film Dorsky was able to shoot on Kodachrome, his preferred and most frequently used film stock. With beguiling apparitions, from beads of light to the cadence of people walking, a wonderful sense of freefall attends what Dorsky calls a “fond farewell to this noble emulsion,” in which darkness gives way to thrilling, lacquered colour. Aubade signals a new beginning, with his shooting on colour negative, which the filmmaker has likened to the difference between painting in oil and acrylic. Glimpses of Paris - the abstraction of its flickering neon signs, the elegance of its views - appear in both Aubade and Pastourelle. While the edited passages accrue emotion and rhythm, each individual image is imbued with exceptional autonomy and magnetic mystery, like modern-day relics for a world both crude and resplendent.