Dorsky: Arbor Vitae and Triste
A music instructor from high school once told me his **secret method** to sustained concentration. He explained that, unlike body nutrition, homeostasis, or other corporeal functions that provide motivational visceral signals, the ebb and flow of our focus does not communicate with our psychic circuitry. For the average person, when their focus is "hungry," they don't know how recognize it or feed it. He recommended to us that we take time in our schedule to take time to observe the organic patterns of natural phenomena - that they revitalize our metabolic rhymes. If you watch the movement of waves, for example, you can feel your ego being pacified, but subliminally, you can feel your subconscious registering the mathematics of the wave functions. The fluttering of leave sin the breeze, while placid to our conscious senses, presents very complex and harmonious visual information. We crave this organic flux, and after viewing it, we can tell that before watching it, we were not "now" and we were not focused - trapped in some void before or after the vivacious "now."
I remembered this advice while watching Dorsky. Arbor Vitae and Triste were so relaxing; not because the films are still, but on the contrary - every shot is effervescent and animated, never still. Each shot is rich with organic entropy. Dorsky captures phenomenology that is completely outward from his manipulative control. He photographs flora and fauna, submitting to natural chaos. The natural truly is chaotic. It presents restless movement that, although seeming initially erratic, accumulates diagrammatically to reveal the harmonious and elegant mathematical patterns of our world. Watching these films was reinvigorating. It was one of the few times that I have watched something and never had a single thought regarding how long into the film I was or how long I had been watching it. After each film ended, I felt neither that it had been a long nor little time since I had commenced watching - I had been in a perennial present.
I love the composition of Dorsky's shots. They each have their own distinct energy points and kinetic composition. There was never a still moment in a single shot - the sway of branches, the dance of shadows, the goading of the wind, flickers of light, rippling water, the natural wobbling of suspended objects, fluid mechanics, the drifting of clouds, even the (argued as impressionist) crackle of the celluloid itself and the apparent transmutation of the image as sequential photographs succeed one after another - the ever-changing environment of Dorsky's canvas was richly stimulating for me.
Under the confluence of cosmic waves and forces, nature never halts. Whether on an atomic or galactic platform, energy never dissipates, but experiences continual fission and fusion of its conserved self. This entropy is captured so beautifully by film, for film is dynamic by its very design. Film cannot be idle; the photograph is idle - the confluence of multitudinous photographs amounting to the gestalt of moving-picture cinema. The film strip is a vital organism in that every frame of its projected image marks further elongation of its survival - a survival accommodated by its digestive system: the photographic aperture's consumption of phenomenology and representation excretion. Watching the films, I found myself in agreement with Dorsky's quote: "the more we are able to relax and accept the absolute presence of our situation and then begin to recognize its formal qualities, the greater the chance we have to transmute it." For me, these "formal qualities" are the cinematic grace of the organic, the organic grace of cinema, and the organic cinema of human sight.
I found Devotional Cinema to be very elucidating. Dorsky discussed many epistemological concerns of sight/spectatorship frequently on my mind, such as the friction between the certain internal and the uncertain external. He related some important historical marks following epistemological criticism of seeing. His argument to resolve the Medieval perspective of seeing as internal and Renaissance perspective of seeing as external is so cool! Of the two, the former seems less prevalent in our contemporary beliefs. Though perspectivism or solipsism are disconcerting - feeling as if there is no external, that our mind produces our virtual spectacle - some though should be given towards the questionable transparency of our ocular physiology as a informative medium. I personally question the simplicity of my perception. Taking into consideration the dynamic chaos of quantum matter - how the modica of large visible structures are constantly whizzing and colliding - it makes no sense for their accumulation to be so geometrically stable. How can a table be so tactile and sturdy when its molecular infrastructure is in such flux? Another example is, how can you trust that an apple is red when, in reality, the apple reflects every electromagnetic chromatic frequency other than red? In brief, I always take into account that phenomenology is entropic, dealing in irrational numbers, and that my mind must, for the sake of its calculations, round its numbers and paraphrase the fractal-like maelstrom of the external world. Dorsky's films present images that are notably perspectival in how their composition utilizes depth of field. Images often include foregrounded objects, shadows of unseen objects, diffracted light, objects seen through windows with reflected images from things n the other side of the window, static foreground with mobile background, etc. The composition speaks to the position of the seer, but also effects what is seen. The resultant epistemological sensation is that though there is a 'image' that we view while seeing, it is negotiated by an intermediary, whose impression upon the visual image is just as integral to the resultant visual as that upon which it impresses. Though there is in one sense an objective externality, its ubiquitous total is intangible. You cannot see the abstract total form of "a bed," only a view of a bed from a particular observational position. To know that a large ball is round, you must observe its contortion as you circumambulate it. To see the totality of a room is impossible, you must navigate it The refusal of ubiquity to the human subject marks the parturition of time and space - space behind required in order to allow for the subject to see the ubiquity of an external object by synecdoche of every perspectival angle, and time required in order to move from any single perspective in space to another. Dorsky's shots do not present any kind of ubiquity. Each image is crucially affected by the position from which it is seen. This stressed subjectivity, along which the constant virtual entropy of the image, truly establishes the "nowness" which Dorsky stresses. I am so very much steeped in "nowness" while watching his films. The images, so often micro-spective, give the viewer so room to imagine what lies outside the frame. With there being no sound, or narrative, the images are temporally significant. They are everything for the duration that they are. The shots leave the viewer no desire to wander temporally or spatially from the current moment. The minutiae - the often quotidian or banal subject matter in the shot, augment and fill the space. The rattling of a fork on a table is now ambassador to the whole cosmos - it is all of spacetime for its limelight moment, and its effervescent dance on crackling celluloid is just as vivacious as anything else. Since watching these films, I notice my gaze wandering to highly kinetically stimulating vistas: micro-moments. The shaking of someone's foot at the library, the blinking and nodding of someone reading, fingers tapping, the way in which the floor looks as my head sway - all these things are, in their own focused context, galactic kinetic forces in of themselves. By never being still, by always being now, by viewing every space as oceanic whose energy is always fluctuating and never dormant, I find myself always now and never dead. I think it is important that Dorsky incorporates the modern and quotidian as well as the mystical and natural. By including images of money handling and store fronts, he thereby saves them, forgives them, refuses to exclude them from the devotion of the human experience.
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