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Wavelengths 4: Pastourelle

Wavelengths 4: Pastourelle

  • Country: USA
  • Year: 2010
  • Language: Silent
  •  
  • Runtime: 17
  • Programmes:

"A pastourelle and an aubade are two different forms of courtship songs from the Troubadour tradition. In this case, the film Pastourelle, a sister film to Aubade, is in the more tumultuous key of spring." (N. Dorsky)

Films in Wavelengths 4: Pastourelle

Compline

Nathaniel Dorsky

"Compline is a night devotion or prayer, the last of the canonical hours, the final act in a cycle. This film is also the last film I will be able to shoot in Kodachrome, a film stock I have shot since I was 10 years old. It is a loving duet with and a fond farewell to this noble emulsion." (N. Dorsky)

Aubade

Nathaniel Dorsky

"An aubade is a poem or morning song evoking the first rays of the sun at daybreak. Often, it includes the atmosphere of lovers parting. This film is my first venture into shooting in color negative after having spent a lifetime shooting Kodachrome. In some sense, it is a new beginning for me." (N. Dorsky)

Pastourelle

Nathaniel Dorsky

"A pastourelle and an aubade are two different forms of courtship songs from the Troubadour tradition. In this case, the film Pastourelle, a sister film to Aubade, is in the more tumultuous key of spring." (N. Dorsky)

Water Lilies

T. Marie

A shimmery, abstract tryptich inspired by Claude Monet.

screening times

    • Sunday September 12
    • 7:00:00 PM
    • JACKMAN HALL - AGO

Note: indicates Premium Screening.

official description

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, Dorsky’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.

The programme concludes with T. Marie’s wondrous digital triptych, Water Lilies, which evokes Monet’s late Impressionist series. Meticulously employing the inherent aesthetisizing properties of pixels by literally working with time and luminosity values to create the translucent, mirror-like qualities of water, T. Marie conveys a persistence and replenishment of vision: bright, alive and invigorating.

Andréa Picard

director bio

Nathaniel Dorsky’s credits include Pneuma (76-82), Hours for Jerome (80-82), Alaya (76-87), Triste (74-96), Arbor Vitae (00), Threnody (04), Song and Solitude (06), Winter (07) and Sarabande (08), which screened at the Festival.


T. Marie is an interdisciplinary artist whose work has screened at M.I.T., Portland Art Center, International Film Festival Rotterdam and the Toronto International Film Festival.

     
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