The Cinematheque

16mm Prints

“Breathtaking … In the Stone House is a work of many tiny miracles.”

Maximilien Luc Proctor, Ultra Dogme

The formal parameters of silent-speed poetic cinema, for Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler, often have less to do with personality and more to do with the actual camera mechanism. This principle is on display in three works, each employing a starkly different method to arrive at the astonishing beauty found across their respective films. Black leader separates the painterly shots of In the Stone House, Hiler’s retrospective accumulation of layered in-camera superimpositions, filmed in the late ​’60s and edited to completion in 2012. Dorsky’s dazzling 17 Reasons Why is the product of consumer-grade Regular 8 printed unsplit onto 16mm, creating a grid of four moving images. As Dorsky recommends, our eyes can ​“bounce, ricochet, investigate, and compare” across the film’s magical, rhythmic variation. Song and Solitude shows Dorsky working with shadow and underexposure, in the process revealing some of the most intensely captivating images in all his work.

In the Stone House
USA 2012
Jerome Hiler
35 min. 16mm

17 Reasons Why
USA 1987
Nathaniel Dorsky
19 min. 16mm

Song and Solitude
USA 2006
Nathaniel Dorsky
21 min. 16mm