Song and Solitude
Conceived and photographed with the loving collaboration of Susan Vigil during the last year of her life, Song and Solitude is balanced more toward an expression of inner landscape, or what it feels like to be, rather than an exploration of the external visual world as such.
Nathaniel Dorsky
Director
Also Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky
"February was photographed during the first weeks of early spring in San Francisco. For me there is a haunted sense of restlessness in its form, some desire for a new freedom, a fresh sense of cinema. It feels to me to be the conclusion of an exploration that began with Triste, some 20 films earlier. What will follow, I do not know." - 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. -Nathaniel Dorsky
The Kodachrome Dailies consist of all the Kodachrome footage chosen to be worked with to make the film Song and Solitude during years 2005 and 2006. During that period I still had the great privilege to be shooting Kodachrome. My method for editing was to first select the footage I wanted to use from the original camera rolls and then make an internegative and work print of that selected material to work with in the editing. (In an earlier period, I did not have to first make an internegative, but could more simply make a work print directly off the camera original, but Kodak cancelled the reversal work print film stock.)
"Seven and a half weeks ago, I had open heart surgery...In the three weeks to go before the operation, I bought 21 rolls of film and said 'I'm going to shoot a roll of film every day until I go to the hospital.' ... This film is shot with the overall feeling for me, personally, that it's elegiac, it's like saying goodbye to the world."
Autumn, photographed during the last months of the drought year, 2015, is a stately, but intimate, seasonal tome, a celebration of the poignancy and mystery of our later years. – Nathaniel Dorsky
Like a memory already gone, this place of life.—Nathaniel Dorsky
Light in the gardens of the San Francisco Arboretum, photographed in early spring. Elohim are divine beings, the energy of light as creation.
“The title Apricity refers to the warmth of the sun in winter. It is an homage to the writer Jane (Brakhage) Wodening. In speaking to her I mused, ‘perhaps your age is the winter and you are the warmth of the sun.’” –Nathaniel Dorsky
"Temple Sleep was photographed and edited during the initial Virus lockdown. The fly casting pools in Golden Gate Park became a mind healing place for me, a calming space of sacredness, tempered by the fear of the on-coming unknown. A place of feminine power" - N.D.
Sand, wind, and light intermingle with the emulsions. The viewer is the star.
