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.

Joseph Plateau, who invented the phenakistoscope, the first device capable of producing the illusion of a moving image from a sequence of still images, provided a definition of the persistence of vision in 1829. In his research into visual physiology, he described the effects of light stimuli and colors on the retina, determining their duration to equal one tenth of a second. Yet this value is not constant: it increases as the eye adapts to darkness, hence the sensation of movement which is characteristic of a film projection. Plateau thought that the eye sees at a rate of ten images per second and that, when they are superimposed, the brain links them into a single, continuous, moving image.

Between January 13 and 17, 10 screenings dedicated to the film work of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler will take place in Barcelona. The film retrospective, “Illuminated Hours: The Devotional Cinema of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler”, organized by Francisco Algarín Navarro and Carlos Saldaña, will be celebrated in three different venues: Xcèntric, the cinema of the Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, the Catalonian Cinematheque and ZumZeig Cinema.