Initiated amid the flowering of artisanal cinema in 1960s New York and continuing uninterrupted until today, the moving-image careers of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler are among the most captivating in film history. Their art, driven by the quest for a humanely lyrical cinema, transfigures ordinary surroundings into intimate glimpses of transcendence and offers audiences the experience of vision as an open form of poetry. Though each has produced a distinct body of work—Dorsky struggled for decades to refine the delicately precise and inventive approach to editing he would call “polyvalent montage,” while Hiler’s films were, until little more than a decade ago, seen and admired by friends in home screenings—they share radically akin sensibilities: both remain faithful to the 16mm Bolex camera and the palpable silence of 18-frames-per-second analog projection. In their hands, these minimal tools become the catalysts for a layered, world-creating cinema that echoes an eclectic array of devotional art, from medieval stained glass to Yasujirō Ozu, from Hans Memling to John Ashbery and John Ford.

In celebration of 60 years of ongoing explorations and unique advancements in poetic cinema, Illuminated Hours presents a wide-ranging selection of works by the two filmmakers, tracing their shared lives of creative exchanges and including North American and world premieres. An introduction or Q&A with the filmmakers accompanies the first screening of each program. The series coincides with the American release of Illuminated Hours: The Early Cinema of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler, a publication that brings together texts and images from their first decades of filmmaking, as well as the forthcoming series Illuminated Hours: Three Evenings with Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler at Anthology Film Archives (May 17–19).
(Introductory text by Carlos Saldaña and Francisco Algarín Navarro)

Organized by Carlos Saldaña and Francisco Algarín Navarro, guest curators; Ron Magliozzi, Curator; and Francisco Valente, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Film, MoMA.

Thu, May 9, 7:00 p.m. - Followed by a discussion with Jerome Hiler, Carlos Saldaña and Francisco Algarín
Cinema Before 1300 (2023)
Directed by Jerome Hiler
Like his discovery of cinema when he was a child, the encounter with medieval stained glass windows was a revelation for Jerome Hiler. The filmmaker, also a stained glass artist for years, traveled to France and England in the 1990s to study and photograph the windows of the great cathedrals and chapels built in the XII and XIII centuries. His insightful commentary and a selection of 35mm slides illustrated Cinema Before 1300, a lecture on the sensually spiritual language of stained glass, simultaneously a devotional art and “mass media.” Under the initiative of the Harvard Film Archive, Hiler expanded the original lecture, which he performed live in different art centers and universities, and transformed it into a feature-length motion picture. Cinema Before 1300 is a branching meditation on the significance of this (and all) light-based projective art.

Fri, May 10, 4:30 p.m. - Followed by a discussion with Nathaniel Dorsky, Jerome Hiler, Carlos Saldaña, and Francisco Algarín
Tue, May 14, 4:30 p.m.
Dorsky and Hiler Program 1: Seasons and Stanzas
At age 21, Nathaniel Dorsky completed three sound films that announced his startling potential as a maker of poetic cinema and as a young adult coming to terms with adolescence in 1950s suburbia. Ingreen, A Fall Trip Home, and Summerwind explore an evolving consciousness of family, sexuality and childhood memories, both sensual and traumatic, in a lush articulation of plastic superimpositions and modulated time. His film practice was forever changed after Jerome Hiler gifted him a 100-foot roll, Fool’s Spring, in which Dorsky discovered the blossoming of life and film in a silent expression freed from description and narrative. After this first revelation and for the next five years, he pursued an open-ended, projectless film exploration, gathering material “comparable to a painter’s plein air sketchbook,” which he edited a decade later in Hours for Jerome, his first exploration of an “open form of montage” and a loving offering to his life partner.

• Ingreen. 1964. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 12 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
• A Fall Trip Home. 1964. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 11 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
• Summerwind. 1965. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 14 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
• Two Personal Gifts aka Fool’s Spring. 1966–67. USA. Directed by Jerome Hiler & Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 7 min.
• Hours for Jerome Part 1. 1966–70. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 21 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
• Hours for Jerome Part 2. 1966–70. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 24 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.

Fri, May 10, 7:00 p.m. - With an introduction from Jerome Hiler
Tue, May 14, 6:30 p.m.
Dorsky and Hiler Program 2: Flowers Pressed in a Book
Although Jerome Hiler began filming in the early 1960s, for over thirty years he only showed his footage in fleeting assemblages meant for the privacy of home screenings. The three films in this program, edited between 2012 and 2016, integrate material from over forty years in a gracefully crafted visionary autobiography, as far from the anecdotal and diaristic as it installs itself at the core of the experiential. From the very first moving images he ever captured to present-day sights and plastic interventions, these films are a cascade of telescoped time and techniques (chiefly, the modulation of color, rhythm, filmed abstraction, superimpositions, and portraiture) through which the body and life of the filmmaker become affectionately visible.

• Bagatelle II. 1964–2016. USA. Directed by Jerome Hiler. 16mm. 16 min.
• In the Stone House. 1967–70 / 2012. USA. Directed by Jerome Hiler. 16mm. 35 min.
• New Shores. 1971–87 / 2014. USA. Directed by Jerome Hiler. 16mm. 32 min.

Sat, May 11, 4:00 p.m. - Followed by a discussion with Nathaniel Dorsky, Jerome Hiler, Carlos Saldaña and Francisco Algarín
Wed, May 15, 4:30 p.m.
Dorsky and Hiler Program 3: Breadth of Light
Through widely varying means, Nathaniel Dorsky’s and Jerome Hiler’s filming and editing strategies aim to preserve their films’ inexhaustibleness, conjuring a world as pregnant with potential as life itself. Dorsky’s work has evolved from a “polyvalent montage” that opens up the film’s scope at every cut to a structure based on the development of sequences in a distinct setting. In the last decade, however, he more often combines both approaches, making distant images arc with others as the constellated words of a poem and balancing this open poetic expression with spiraling variations on a subject. The painstakingly lucid improvisations of Hiler’s somatic camera and his musical sense of editing, rich in rhythmic inflections, weld physical and psychological aspects that convert the screen into a mirror and a self-portrait of the mind.

• Sarabande. 2008. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 15 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
• The Dreamer. 2016. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 19 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
• Lamentations. 2020. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 14 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
• Epilogue. 2016. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 15 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
• Ruling Star. 2019. USA. Directed by Jerome Hiler. 16mm. 23 min.

Sat, May 11, 6:30 p.m. - With an introduction from Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler
Wed, May 15, 6:30 p.m.
Dorsky and Hiler Program 4: Floating Weeds
As their intimate relationship with the 16mm Bolex camera evolved through the decades, Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler never relented in the transfigurative exploration of visual phenomena. Both film poets rip the light’s spectrum open into emerging worlds of color and magmatic, starry shapes. However disorienting in their initial grasp, Dorsky’s images often deploy an abstract figuration that sparks an interim between the viewer’s conscious and subconscious. Hiler’s multi-layered imagery implodes the solidness of matter, and stained remnants of filmed reality immerge, as passing glances, into a visionary air. The stratified depth they both inflect on the screen, where focal point, figure-ground and spatial coordinates become undiscernible, is a sustained variation on the unthinkable abundance of perception.

• Compline. 2009. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 18 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
• Interlude. 2019. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 11 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
• Intimations. 2015. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 18 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
• Words of Mercury. 2010–11. USA. Directed by Jerome Hiler. 16mm. 2010-2011 min.

Sun, May 12, 1:30 p.m. - Introduced by Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler
Thu, May 16, 4:30 p.m.
Dorsky and Hiler Program 5: Light’s Refrain
Whether progressing from shot to shot or through well-delimitated sequences, “polyvalent montage” sparks soaringly dense films, where the spectator’s attunement to the immediate presence of each image and cut both fuels and hampers their conscious apprehension of the overall flow. In Triste, which draws footage from two decades and took three years to edit, Nathaniel Dorsky conceived of a haltless continuum where each image is a single chord that would distinctly resonate with all others around it. This polymorphous mosaic contrasts and relates with Marginalia, Jerome Hiler’s exploration of a dusking calligraphic and gestural culture. In April, Dorsky seductively portrays urban spring and its dwellers, blossoming glass planes and alienated human figures who seem to communicate from a distance. The program concludes with the world premiere of Hiler’s latest film, Careless Passage, where a city of detritus and colored gold opens a new view around every corner.

• Triste. 1978–96. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 18 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
• Marginalia. 2016. USA. Directed by Jerome Hiler. 16mm. 23 min.
• April. 2012. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 26 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
• Careless Passage. 2024. USA. Directed by Jerome Hiler. 16mm. 20 min.

Sun, May 12, 4:00 p.m. - Followed by a discussion with Nathaniel Dorsky, Jerome Hiler, Carlos Saldaña and Francisco Algarín
Thu, May 16, 6:30 p.m.
Dorsky and Hiler Program 6: The Golden Square. Recent Films by Nathaniel Dorsky
In the wake of his monumental Arboretum Cycle (2017), Nathaniel Dorsky has time and again returned to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park to spawn films whose subject is none other than light itself in its mysterious, transformative being. Using his Bolex camera as a musical instrument, he animates a myriad of ever-modulating visual nuances that summon a singularly human yet disembodied spiritual presence. Brief glimpses of the urban are subsumed in a primal world of foliage, wind, sky, and undulating surfaces. This program presents a selection from the last five years to the world premiere of his latest film, including Apricity and Caracole (for Izcali), two rare examples of portraiture in Dorsky’s recent work.

• Apricity. 2019. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 22 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
• Place d’Or. 2023. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 10 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
• Caracole (for Izcali). 2023. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 18 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
• Dialogues. 2022. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 18 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
• Interval. 2021. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 13 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.
• O Death. 2023. USA. Directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. 16mm. 6 min. Courtesy of Pacific Film Archive.