Hours for Jerome (1980-1982 - Nathaniel Dorsky)
Nathaniel Dorsky is one of my favourite filmmakers, and unfortunately his work is generally only available at festivals because he doesn't like what digital compression does to image quality.
His later films are totally silent and play without musical accompaniment, there is no sense of traditional narrative, no actors, and generally no people. He likes to find abstract patterns in unusual places, and often plays with the camera focus to achieve this, he also likes grids and meshes, shots with foreground tantalisingly obscuring most of the background, shots which capture a certain quality of light at dusk or dawn, and fantastic botanical shots. Generally his films are extremely tranquil and occasionally breathtaking in the profound beauty he manages to find. It's very hard to make a picture without music, generally filmmakers use music to paper over the cracks in their films, you can imbue a banal scene with pathos if you play Beethoven's Ninth over the top. So this is really cinema with the stabilisers off.
Hours for Jerome is fascinating because as an early work it does display a lot of the same traits as the stuff to come, but also there's disintctly brilliant montage that you don't see him do any more and the style is a lot more free. He shot it between 1966 and 1970, but didn't get around to editing it until 1980, which then took him two years! So he had quite a big break from filmmaking. Jerome is Jerome Hiler, Dorsky's long term partner, who is also a filmmaker as well as being involved in painting stained glass. The Hours of the title is a reference to the Mediaeval books, which were usually containing prayers and psalms and such like. Dorsky's cinema is a cinema of devotion.
The movie starts off with some nice forest shots, though they are pretty they are not difficult to find. He does some nice shots of some twigs with white blossoms against a light blue sky, that I've actually seen a VERY similar shot of in another movie where it was being used as an allegory of the Resurrection, and you often feel that, especially in his later films, Dorsky's shots have a lot of meaning behind them. Then the movie goes ape and there's a hyperedited sequence of green and yellow floral shots, coming off the screen like fire from a machine guns, real firecracker cinema, can't remember ever seeing anything like that before. Dorsky certainly doesn't do stuff like that any more, and he did say that there was a certain youthful energy to Hours.
Then away we are to the city, which I think is New York but I'm no expert on American cities, especially New York which you can find a hundred different cities in if you look right. There's time lapse photography out of a nice apartment window overlooking a busy freeway and the river, there's this pure churn of light. Time lapse photography of chimneys looks quite funky as well as the passage of a sickle moon, both shots very reminiscent of shots used by William Raban in his wonderful 2010 movie About Now - MMX. Then some shots that were frankly astonishing, of furiously gitterbugging neon on a blue background, strange perturbed images that reminded me of the Wols painting the Blue Phantom (1951) http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/famous-artists/wols.htm , only come to life. I have the phrase "glitterbugging blue swimcity" in my notes.
Humour comes into the Hours as well when along comes this old lady ploughing through flood water in her bright red sports car, as close as you can come to a real life version of Mr Magoo http://www.ridelust.com/wp-content/uploads/magoo.jpg.
A contender for prettiest shot is the traffic shown under the underground lines (think The French Connection), the light comes down through the gratings producing regular flickers on the cars, in all sorts of lovely green and yellow colours reacting well with red vehicles. A woman floats along the street with a pagoda umbrella casually browsing, then we're in a museum with a whale skeleton and huge big trompers (presumably mammoths but couldn't make them out). Then we're onto Jerome's cats, shots of which are again, outrageously beautiful, even when the charcoal colour one is lapping up water from a saucer with pretty flowers on the bottom. More humour when Dorsky shows people walking in the street in slow motion and a wizened old man slowly rotates round to check out two young ladies he's just passed.
We're back to Jerome and life in the countryside including an Arcadian flop around in a crystal stream bordered by pristine forest. Indoors there are warm shots, a sodium yellow glow from beneath a yellow lampshade, a book on Mozart, pages illuminated by red light. Some mesh shots to prefigure his later work. A line of poetry from Yeats pops into my head, "And pluck till time and times are done / The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun", from the Song of Wandering Aengus.
The movie is split into two parts and it's now time for part two, where there is a level of seasonal change. Time for a time lapsed forest shot from a high place, Peploe colours (http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=11518) of Autumn trees inumbrated in quick waves. Epedeictic flocking of birds in the countryside, apple orchards heavy with red apples that look like they are made of porcelain. Jerome and friends cack around a bit in funny masks that have odd expressions.
In the city the uber-shots start to spall out of the screen, the city looks dead and golden, black clouds float past, some of the skyscrapers are absolutely smothered in blackness, other parts of the image are daylit. I have no idea how he could have possibly made that shot. A beautiful contoured chrome bonnet acts as a kind of toboggan, along which I slid down streets of pure light, like some sort of dream water slide or roller coaster. It's winter time and the guys are heading down some back cricks sliding along with their hockey gear, there's some blue snowflakes fluttering down. What is the next shot, a peak into a data mine on an alien planet? No it's revealed to be bubbles captured in thick ice after the shot pulls up. Jerome's doing an experiment with some film stock dipping it in who knows what, coca cola? Something's a-boiling in a clear jam jar. A black and diamante city appears.
Hard to get across how clever some of the shots are, how vibrant and energetic the editing sometimes is. One helluva film.