Calling all romantics, stoners, and formalists! We’re showing a split program dedicated to Dorsky and Hiler, two legends of avant-garde cinema known for their meticulously constructed works of abstract beauty. As partners for more than six decades, they have exerted a profound influence on one another, and so it’s no surprise that they share a number of artistic sensibilities (“polyvalent” theories of montage; sensitivity to the effects of changing seasons; a reverential approach wherein “film itself” might take on “the spirit or experience of religion”).

"Intermittence penetrates to the very core of our being, and film vibrates in a way that is close to this core." In his book Devotional Cinema, filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky identifies the feeling of illness or health that follows experiencing certain films, and locates as the cause a film's ability to "mirror and realign our metabolism." For example, the intermittent quality of light in film projection is not unlike our natural vision or the way we experience life (with gaps and moments of the unknown).

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.