devotional cinema

2021

Notes on devotional cinema by nathaniel dorsky

The post film experience

It is important to understand what we are participating in, to realize we rest in darkness and experience vision. Many people take vision as a given and don’t realize that they are actually seeing.

Viewing a film has tremendous mystical implications, it can be a way of approaching and manifesting the ineffable. This respect for the ineffable is an essential aspect of devotion.

It can achieve a transcendental balance

Balance is neither our vision nor our belief in exterior objectivity. Belongs to no one and exists nowhere

They illustrate a scripted, written reality or concept rather than manifesting directly as a vision

We don’t experience a continuum of existence. Sometimes we are here and sometimes not, suspended in a rapid fire illusion. Afterall, do any of us know who we actually are?

Life is full of gaps

Nowness in cinema respects the nowness of the audience

Reality opens and responds to itself

Everything is expressing itself as what it is

Everything is alive and talking to us

Allowing things to be seen for what they are offers a more open, more febrile ground than the realm of predetermined symbolic meaning, the unknown is pure adventure

Film at its transformative is not a literary medium

Film is light sculpture in time

To the degree that a filmmaker can relate directly to the heart of an object, the viewer will also connect to the heart of the object. The audience will see the screen as the camera sees the objects. And a greater unity of heart will talk place between filmmaker and audience.