JEROME HILER – NATHANIEL DORSKY | 4.16.2025
The department of Film and Video at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design is pleased to welcome Jerome Hiler and Nathaniel Dorsky to the MassArt Ciné Culture Screening series. Join us on Wednesday, April 16th, at 5:00 PM in FM1 Screening Room, MassArt.
Mercurial Light, Bathed in Time: A program of 16mm Films by Jerome Hiler and Nathaniel Dorsky, Created Between 2011 and 2024
Jerome Hiler has been shooting 16mm film since 1964. A New Yorker by birth, he entered the avant-garde community there during its most intense period of provocation and splendor. For all of his younger years, he contented himself with improvisational screenings at his home for other filmmakers. In 1971, he arrived in San Francisco and joined the filmmaking world there with the same at-home manner of ad-hoc screenings for whoever wanted to come by. In the 1990s, Hiler was invited by the collective SILT to be part of their show at the S F Cinematheque at the Art Institute Theater. After a few documentaries made with Owsley Brown, Hiler commenced on a series of films both new and using material from the past and sometimes both. His films have been seen throughout the U S and Europe.
Nathaniel Dorsky born in New York City in 1943, is an experimental filmmaker and film editor who has been making films since 1963. He has resided in San Francisco since 1971.
In his book Devotional Cinema (2003), Dorsky writes of the long-standing link between art and health as well as the transformative potential of watching film. He also writes of the limitations of film when its vision is subservient to an idea or representative of language description, which can describe a world but does not actually see it. Devotional Cinema is now in its third edition and has been or is being translated into French, Spanish, Croatian, Dutch and Chinese. The first edition has been translated into Italian.
Dorsky was a visiting instructor at Princeton University in 2008 and he has been the recipient of many awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship 1997 and grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, two from the Rockefeller Foundation, and one from the LEF Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the California Arts Council. He has presented films at the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Tate Modern, the Filmoteca Española, Madrid, the Prague Film Archive, the Vienna Film Museum, the Cinemateca Portuguesa in Lisbon, the Pacific Film Archive, the Harvard Film Archive, Princeton University, Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, and frequently exhibits new work at the New York Film Festival’s Views from the Avant-Garde and the Wavelengths program of the Toronto International Film Festival. In the spring of 2012 Dorsky screened films as part of the three month long Whitney Biennial. And in October 2015, the New York Film Festival honored his work with a thirty four film complete retrospective at Lincoln Center. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times listed this retrospective in second place in her list of the top ten films of 2015.
Dorsky’s films are available only as 16mm film prints and are distributed by Canyon Cinema in San Francisco and Light Cone in Paris. Prints of stills from his films are available at the Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, and the Peter Blum Gallery, New York City.
JEROME HILER
NATHANIEL DORSKY