"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.

On the occasion of Bay Area Now 9, Cinematheque returns for two special screenings at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in the month of October. Running October 6–31, CROSSROADS at 14 looks back on the first fourteen years of Cinematheque’s annual festival. San Francisco Cinematheque: Contemporary Views from the Bay Area, featuring work by ten Bay Area filmmakers created 2020–2023, screens October 21.