It was easy to miss the publication earlier this year of experimental filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky’s second book, a volume of photographs entitled Eclogues: Letters and Correspondence. Printed privately by Dorsky as a gift for friends, Eclogues was self-distributed by its author, by hand and mail, as though it was itself one of the eponymous letters. A smaller printing was simultaneously made available as a limited edition, for sale through his New York gallery. Although almost wordless—save its title, dedication, and colophon pages—Eclogues’ unnumbered sequence of images speak revealingly to central ideas of Dorsky’s filmmaking. In many ways it is also a fitting work of art for this time of plague.
Those who know and admire Dorsky’s 16mm films will recognize a profound “correspondence” between Eclogues and his cinema, beginning with the title, whose obscure meaning—a reference to Virgil’s Bucolics—recalls the elusive single words often used to evocatively name his films. Dorsky’s precise arrangement of photographs deepens the dialogue between book and cinema by engaging principals of montage explored both in his lyrical films and influential first book, Devotional Cinema. In Dorsky’s films, montage imparts the gently exact passage from one image to the next with a distinctly musical rhythm while giving each of his visually striking, often mysterious images a vividly fleeting screen presence and poignancy.
One of the Dorsky speaks of his approach to montage: “a cut has to work on a visual level, in terms of shape, texture, color, movement, and weight. Somehow the shift from one shot to the next has to create a visual freshness for the psyche.”
