Dorsky–Devotional Cinema

In Devotional Cinema, Nathaniel Dorsky explores the qualities which he finds present in the films he deems successful. He begins this exploration by relating to the reader the experience of being “completely cured” after attending a student production of a Mozart opera. The reason for this, he asserts, is that great, “uncompromising” works of music, just as great works on film, resonate in their timing and rhythm with the metabolism of the viewer or listener – are “transformative to it – and therefor realign the metabolic energies in a harmonious fashion, producing a feeling of wellbeing or rejuvenation.

Next, Dorsky turns his attention to the material qualities of film, and how these are experienced in the cinema. He compares the human skull, a dark space illuminated by visual images, with the cinema. He maintains that from this point of view two distinct possibilities of seeing the world, or of making films, emerge. The first is grounded in the own psyche, and is concerned with a view of the world emanating from one’s own consciousness. According to this view, a tree falling in the woods with no one there to hear it produces no sound. The second view can be considered to be the polar opposite of the first one. In this mode of vision, the viewer is considered to be a part of their surroundings, and the surroundings themselves are seen as continuous, whether or not they are inhabited by the viewer.

Dorksy then goes on to explain that, in his opinion, the best films are those which achieve a a delicate, yet forceful, balance between these opposites. Dorsky strongly favors films which are firmly grounded in an objective temporal reality of continuously unfolding time and narrative, but which also allow for the possibility of transcending that reality in favor of preserving or extending the present moment, and which ground the viewer in that sense of presentness throughout the film. This is when watching a film becomes akin to a religious experience, or as Dorsky put it, when film becomes Devotional Cinema. 

While I have experienced sensations similar to what Dorsky describes in his text when watching films, those experiences seem to be few and far apart, and their occurrence seems more probable when I’m not watching big budget American movies. That is not to say that those movies aren’t entertaining, they are. However, they seem to function more as a device conducive to escapism and temporary oblivion, rather than to presentness within the “now” and transformative experiences.