ART
THE NATURE OF ARTIFICE

by Ari Spool Sep 04, 2012

Sabrina Ratté. Faceless Kiss. Music by Jeffre Cantu-Ledesma. Digital and analog video. 2012. All video courtesy of the artist.

Sabrina Ratté talks to Ari Spool about her films and the organic nature of the inorganic artifice.

Sabrina Ratté’s films are usually set to music made by machines. Out of the 20 or so videos she’s made that I’ve seen, only two had a human figure, and every single one had music made by digital or analog synthetic means—in Sabrina’s work, no one is ever playing the violin. Synthesizers of all types are the soundtrack to her films, and they are almost uniformly lush, ambient, and beautiful.

To talk about the music before addressing the visual elements of the films themselves is necessary: in order to understand the imagery presented one must know that the music is inorganic. A viewer must also engage with the colors, drawn from nature—an aqueous palette of purples and blues, sometimes veering into a heat-map red, sometimes working with beige-inflected oranges and greens. Once familiarized with the music and the colors, all that remains to approach are the shapes. Depending on the music used, the shapes follow different rules. Sometimes they are anthropomorphic daubs, sometimes skittering matrices.

In each of these works, the viewer enters into worlds of Sabrina’s making. A view of these artificial settings is washed with a fuzz, as if the lens has been scrubbed with a scratchy sponge. Nothing stands still—the view out the windows, the floors, and the walls all appear to vibrate, either with the flicker characteristic of a VHS, or with an even, steady glide across other panes of the image. In the presence of these environments the sensation is all-encompassing; the artificiality is, at times, almost overwhelming.

Sabrina lives in Montreal. I live in Queens. Over a month’s time, we corresponded via email to build out this exchange.

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FILM
MEDITATIONS ON FILM

by Ari Spool Oct 03, 2012

Nathaniel Dorsky. Brown Branches. Film still from The Return, 2011. All photos courtesy of Nathaniel Dorsky.

Ari Spool talks to avant-garde filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky about montage, humanism, and his childhood exploits in film.

Nathaniel Dorsky’s poetic silent films, created on fine grain color stock, approach earthly life with a compassionate heart. The four films of his I’ve seen—The Return, Aubade, Compline, and Alaya, each a roughly half-hour montage—all share this delicate texture and humanist feeling.

Dorsky edits together images of nature, light, and figures. His films have no narrative arc in the traditional sense. Rather, they are lingering scenes that when taken cumulatively have an emotional effect not unlike deep meditation: the shots can take you to unexpected places. Alaya, for instance, a Kodachrome ode to the beauty of sand, possesses some traditional-seeming shots of wind moving sand across dunes. But the sand has unexpected secrets—it moves aggressively over long distances, and softly under the tide, tiptoeing across its own surface. After the viewer has been thinking about these movements for a while, Dorsky integrates new actions. A beachy shelf collapses, and your breath stops. An extreme close-up reveals the personalities of different minuscule pieces of silica.

Dorsky’s contemplations of a life working in film are collected in his book Devotional Cinema, an adaptation of a lecture he originally gave at Princeton in 2001. It is a perfect companion to his work. Dorsky pays his bills by editing other people’s films, but he has been making his own since the stewpot of 1960s New York, where he messed around with such characters as Jonas Mekas and Stan Brahkage. His book describes the specific effect film has on the human conception of time, a feature that Dorsky manipulates by keeping his films silent, depriving the viewer of the meter of speech or music so that he may become completely absorbed in the image. He explains why films must be shown in dark rooms to maintain their special magic. Most of all, he exposes some of the wisdom that we can gain from film, even if we rarely get the opportunity to do so.

You can only see Dorsky’s films as they are screened. Luckily, he is premiering two films—April and August and After—at the New York Film Festival’s “Views from the Avant Garde” program on October 6th and 7th. (They will be screened again at the London Film Festival on October 20th.) Both were created after a period of grief Dorsky experienced following the death of his friend George Kuchar. I spoke to Dorsky over video chat while he sat in his kitchen in San Francisco and I in my workspace in Queens, New York. He had challenged me, in advance of our appointment, to try and ask him completely new questions, different from any interview he’d done.

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