The Cinematheque

16mm Prints

“Hours for Jerome is simply the most beautifully photographed film that I’ve ever seen … After exposure to such dense filmic possibilities pretty much the rest of casual moviegoing resounds as hopelessly poverty-stricken.”

Warren Sonbert

Hours for Jerome, likely Nathaniel Dorsky’s best-known yet too-rarely-seen work, screens as the centrepiece of this first of two nights of analogue film by Dorsky and his creative partner Jerome Hiler. The title refers to the ​“book of hours,” a common medieval devotional text. While Dorsky has stated that this isn’t where the true meaning of the film lies—that would be its polyvalent editing technique, which reaches full flower here—the overwhelming richness of Hours is rooted in a time of transformation in Dorsky and Hiler’s life together, a natural flow of suspended moments captured in luminous Kodachrome. Tender beauty and meticulous, deliberately patterned structure operate in concert at every stage of the film’s four-seasons sequence. As Dorsky puts it, ​“I wanted to have my cake and eat it too, and I think I did.” Hiler’s enthralling Bagatelle diptych, the second of which contains images spanning five decades of his work as a film artist, bookends the program.

Bagatelle I
USA 2016
Jerome Hiler
16 min. 16mm

Hours for Jerome I & II
USA 1982
Nathaniel Dorsky
42 min. 16mm

Bagatelle II
USA 2016
Jerome Hiler
16 min. 16mm