García, Miguel

Revistes Catalanes amb Accés Obert

Nathaniel Dorsky. Devotional Cinema
Tuumba Press, Berkeley, 2005, 54 pp.
Miguel García
One of  art’s greatest challenges has always 
been how to transmit the ineffable, all we cannot 
describe or apprehend through the language, all 
we cannot reach using words. Sometimes those 
words can be used as a springboard – as in 
Benjamin Péret’s question remembered by Buñuel 
in his memoirs:
«“Is it really not true that mortadella is made 
by the blind?” For me, this statement in the form 
of  question, is as true as a truth from the Gospel. 
Of  course, some might find the relationship 
between blindness and mortadella somewhat 
absurd, but for me is the magical example of  a 
completely irrational sentence which gets sharply 
and mysteriously bathed under the glimmer of  
truth.» (BUÑUEL, 1982: 190)
His whole work seems to be contained 
in that landscape of  relations – enlightened by 
a question without answer – which opens in 
front of  each reader. Its force comes from the 
impossibility to explain or describe it. But you 
can also suppress any relation with language. The 
cinema of  Nathaniel Dorsky will talk like that, 
with images and time, without language or sound, 
about ineffable truths to which nobody would 
have thought there was an access and, because 
of  that, would have never been able to be shared. 
Near the beginning of  Devotional Cinema, Dorsky 
tells an anecdote which could sound familiar and 
is quickly empowered by its conceptual bond with 
religiousness: upon exiting a screening of  Viaggio 
in Italia (Roberto Rosellini, 1954) all the members 
of  the audience left the room in total silence, and in 
the elevator which brought them to the street the 
awkwardness of  sharing the space with strangers 
had disappeared completely. The film had acted 
as a kind of  secular communion by showing that 
certain intimate and inexpressible truths had been 
seen and communicated, and finally shared, by a 
filmmaker.
In this way of  explaining a spiritual 
connection through the behaviours seen in an 
elevator, and even in the book’s writing style, we 
also see how Dorsky is participating deeply in a 
purely American form of  thought, perhaps started 
by R.W. Emerson in the mid-nineteenth century 
when he was a godfather to Transcendentalism, 
which focused in the familiar and simple matters. 
And just as Devotional Cinema’s prose does not 
hide at any moment its oral source (it is a revision 
of  a John Sacret Young Lecture at Princeton 
University) and handles high concepts using that 
casual tone, its author considers that the search 
of  a spiritual sensibility must always take place in 
the terms of  the close and the common things. 
These elements cannot be just materials to build 
something – all the theoretic structure should be 
built to throw light upon, or protect, that matter.
In this way in his cinema everything he films 
becomes sacred. A shirt, a glass or a handful of  
sand, objects that may have lost their value, worn 
out by the social pressures about what must seem 
important to us. In another one of  the most 
memorable passages of  the book we are invited to 
look at our hands and think about the complexity 
and variety of  the actions they can perform, 
in all the particularities of  this versatile tool, in 
its aesthetic beauty too. The reader suddenly 
REVIEWS · Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. I · No. 1. · 2012 · 108-110
108
miguelangel.garcia03@estudiant.upf.edu
reconfigures the relationship with the hands that 
held unconsciously the book a moment before, 
just as Dorsky is trying, through his cinema, to 
give back the real value to the things registered 
by his camera, obviating the exchange value 
which accompanies and adulterates them (in 
economic terms within a capitalist society, but 
also cinematographically when we are dealing with 
those objects placed in front of  the camera without 
being really observed, merely as a background to 
a plausible narrative). What is sacred is always 
untouchable, immense for itself. The need to 
underline it, staining it with ideas, would be a 
violation. To turn it into a symbol of  other thing 
would be to despise it; to use it as a material for an 
alien discourse, to impose an external sense would 
be to take advantage of  it, reducing it to a poor 
position of  contrivance for a greater end.
In the introduction of  his excellent interview 
with Nathaniel Dorsky, Scott MacDonald reminds 
us of  an interesting controversy:
«Several years ago, Stephen Holden claimed 
that for American Beauty (1999) Sam Mendes had 
borrowed “an image (and an entire aesthetic of  
beauty) from Nathaniel Dorsky’s Variations, in 
which the camera admired a plastic shopping 
bag being blown about by the wind”(New York 
Times, October 9,1999). Dorsky remembers 
receiving a call from someone on the production 
of  American Beauty,asking how Mendes might see 
the film, though he is not convinced that his shot 
was “borrowed”.» (MACDONALD,2006:79-80)
Rather than having yet another discussion 
about commercial cinema’s debts towards the 
American avant-garde, it would perhaps be 
more interesting to focus in how this shot looks 
like in this new life. The scene quickly attracted 
a great deal of  attention and became the most 
commented image of  the film: the plastic bag shot 
(whose movements, of  course, were much more 
distinct and spectacular than those of  Dorsky’s 
bag: it goes up and down and  turns somersaults) is 
introduced by a character with the question: “Do 
you want to see the most beautiful thing I’ve ever 
filmed?” and is accompanied by an evocative piano 
song by Thomas Newman. The character goes 
on, explaining what a special moment it was and 
specifying what it meant for him: “That’s the day I 
realized there was this entire life behind things...”
So in the surface it is the same shot, but only 
there, there is no more relation – perhaps that 
is why Dorsky quickly denied a direct filiation. 
Throughout his text, Dorsky keeps invoking other 
images which do share, in all the levels we have 
discussed, those same principles in the context 
of  narrative cinema. The hat of  an office worker 
filmed by Ozu, or the handkerchief  of  a wife 
filmed by Ford, are not sublimated nor they are the 
symbol of  something that could transfigure them; 
those objects would be in any case the ones who 
are so powerful to be able to change something, 
to get to awaken emotions.
His ideas are so clear and firm that, just with 
a list of  the films mentioned in his book, the 
reader could imagine both the ideas he defends 
and the kind of  cinema he makes; perhaps with 
the same kind of  unexplainable, slippery certitude 
that Buñuel did applaud. By putting together 
and associating these films, Dorsky shows the 
coordinates of  a devotional cinema to which his 
films also belong. In the final step of  editing, 
the sacred objects of  his cinema are connected 
while preserving that mystery of  an inexpressible 
relation (and perhaps, in order to be able to explicit 
his message, Mendes decided to leave alone that 
plastic bag shot), which however allows to feel 
its effect with the same power of  the change of  
verse of  a poem, or the brush-stroke and a certain 
colour in an abstract painting. Ozu films a mother 
embracing his song, then he cuts to a chimney 
expelling black smoke. We have understood. ●
109Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. I · No. 1 · Winter 2012
MIGUEL GARCÍA
BUÑUEL, LUis (1982). Mi último suspiro. Éditions Robert 
Laffont, S.A.. Paris.
DORsKY, NathaNiEL (2005). Devotional Cinema. Tumba 
Press. Berkeley. 
MaCDONaLD, sCOtt (2006). A Critical Cinema 5. Uni-
versity of  California Press, Berkeley.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
NATHANIEL DORSKY. DEVOTIONAL CINEMA
110 Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema · Vol. I · No. 1 · Winter 2012


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