Audio introduction for the Arboretum Cycle playing twice in Maine
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Transcription of Nathaniel Dorsky’s audio introduction for the Arboretum Cycle playing twice in Maine.
Recorded on April 18th, 2025, for screenings at The Strand Theatre in Rockland, Maine (April 27th) and SPACE Gallery in Portland, Maine (May 4th)
Hello everyone! It’s a pleasure to be in front of you, and I hope I can be helpful.
I should explain this, especially for the people from Maine. Northern California has its own sense of seasons, which is quite different than the East Coast, where I grew up. The East Coast seasons are deep in my veins, so to speak, and the California seasons are sort of subtle suggestions of seasons.
But we in California have a rainy season, which is different from the East. It rains, oh, from around Thanksgiving to around Easter. For people in Maine, they might walk out and say, “Those aren’t seasons!” But just go along with it. I had to. It took 15 to 20 years to get used to California!
In Northern California, if there’s no rain – or hardly any rain – during that three-month period, it’s big trouble. So at the time of making this film, we had maybe three years of drought. And then it began to rain after three years. It became a glorious rain, just pouring – not enough to be destructive, but constructive. And somehow, it ignited the garden.
This is a garden in Golden Gate park, which is actually designed by the same people who did Central Park – Olmsted, you know. But within the park, there’s a fenced-off garden, and it ignited. You could just feel it. When you walk in the garden, these plants which had been starving and thirsty, were suddenly drinking it all in and putting out energy. That was unusual.
So I thought I would go out and shoot a film called maybe Early Spring. It ended up being called Elohim.
When I finished that film, I sent it off to the lab. Before it even came back from the lab, I took a walk in the garden again. And now it wasn’t early spring. Now it was mid-spring. That’s more of a full spring.
One film turned into seven films. Each one made as a reaction to the previous one – or maybe not a reaction, but an extension of the previous one – until I returned all the way around again to what we call winter.
The summer, for instance, it wouldn’t rain for months. Everything gets sort of dry and dead. And the wintertime here, unlike the East, everything that was brown during the summer now becomes green during the winter. So the winter is actually a green time.
Anyway, I tried to capture all this. Another thing is, when I was working on it, a friend said to me, “Are you sure? Why does it start at early spring? Maybe it should start in the winter, or maybe it should start someplace else.” So I rearranged the order of the reels, and I played it to myself – and no. I thought you could start anywhere in the circle and be fine, but actually the filmmaking, and the syntaxes and so forth used, were developed over the same yearly period. So things that I was shooting maybe the twelve month of the film, the quality of the shooting was based on those twelve months already of shooting. So there’s a double thing going on: the rotation of the annual cycle, and the development of the silent speech of a visual cinema.
The thing is, in making a silent film, it allows you to articulate with images. It allows for a visual articulation. If you have visual articulation plus sound, the mind goes to sound. I think somehow sound is more basic than seeing. You would think, I would think, sight is primary, but I think sound is primary. And I know that in the Tibetan tradition – the Tibetan Book of the Dead – they mention sound as the last thing to die when you die. So when someone is lying in their bed with their eyes shut, you can still talk to them. They might not be able to see. And there’s this tremendous opportunity with expressing yourself with vision only. The cuts, from one thing to the other, become more comparable to something in music – like a key change, you know? You know a good composer has wonderful key changes. And so going from one shot to the other has the potential for what a key change does, which is to give birth to something fresh and new in the present moment.
When there’s sound, you can take it as a social event. “Oh we are attending an avant-garde film show,” something like that. But when it’s silent, it becomes something more intimate. I don’t know if it’s post-verbal or pre-verbal, but it’s something more intimate. I got to appreciate the silent cinema very, very much.
I think, like grapefruit or olives, it’s kind of an acquired taste. The first moment it might seem like there‘s less than you want, but if you relax and enjoy it, it’ll give you more than you want.
I want to figure out, how can I keep this film being about the place – the garden – but not being limited because it’s about the garden? A silent film about a garden could seem trying, so how could I make the film itself have the same sense of energy and bloom that the plants have?
And frankly, it’s a film I haven’t seen in its entirety since I finished it, which must be a few years now. And I’m looking forward to seeing it. I wish I was in the room with you, because I would love to see it myself.
It was a big thing – and yet a simple and easy thing. It was big and simple.
I hope you can enjoy the film, a lot of it will depend on your neighbor, next to you. If their stomach starts to gurgle, things like that, it would be very disruptive, so I suggest everyone burp before the film begins! (laughs)
