Films By Nathaniel Dorsky

The three films by Nathaniel Dorsky were all silent. I think the silence was supposed to help us focus more on the imagery, edits, and film work but I found it distracting. Silence is awkward and sometimes uncomfortable. Having to sit in a dark theater, and watch a film with no sound is very different from the average moviegoer’s experience, where sometimes the sound is so loud it’s deafening. I found it hard to concentrate; my mind seemed to wander endlessly. I would try to bring it back and keep focused on what I was watching but it was difficult. I started to hear more of the sounds around me, someone coughing, someone eating, the humming of the building and the sound of my friends stomach growling. If the point of Dorsky using silence in his films was to create this awkward atmosphere for his viewers, then he accomplished that. Maybe the point was to heighten the awkwardness so much that you were forced to pay attention to the film in front of you. I would have wanted to hear something, maybe even the sound of a projector going. I’m just so used to having sound playing while I watch a film that this seemed foreign to me. Maybe if I do it enough I will learn to appreciate it for what it is.