In Recognition of the Upcoming Nathaniel Dorsky/Jerome Hiler Retrospective at MoMA, GME Highlights On Our Website Scenes of the Duo from Warren Sonbert's Films

NATHANIEL DORSKY AND JEROME HILER IN WARREN SONBERT’S THE TENTH LEGION (1967). SOURCE: GARTENBERG MEDIA ENTERPRISES.

This week, The Museum of Modern Art will mount the series Illuminated Hours: The Cinema of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler, which coincides with the American release of the book of the same name, edited by Francisco Algarín Navarro and GME associate Carlos Saldaña. The film series “presents a wide-ranging selection of works by [Dorsky and Hiler], tracing their shared lives of creative exchanges and including North American and world premieres. An introduction or Q&A with the filmmakers accompanies the first screening of each program.” Later, from May 17th to May 19th, Anthology Film Archives will host the series Illuminated Hours: Three Evenings with Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler, also in conjunction with Navarro and Saldaña’s book.

Nathaniel Dorsky is an experimental filmmaker and film editor who was a significant figure in the New American Cinema movement of the 1960s. Dorsky met his partner, multimedia artist Jerome Hiler, at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in 1964, at the premiere of his film INGREEN, and won an Emmy Award for the film GAUGIN IN TAHITI: SEARCH FOR PARADISE in 1967, before relocating with Hiler to San Francisco. Hiler, a stained glass artist, is also a filmmaker, yet many of his films were shown in private salon screenings and remained inaccessible to the public until recently.

Dorsky and Hiler were close friends and filmmaking colleagues of Warren Sonbert from the mid-1960s onward. All three helped pioneer the editing style known as “polyvalent montage.” The following video compiles Dorsky and Hiler’s appearances in Sonbert’s films THE TENTH LEGION (1967), HOLIDAY (1968), and NOBLESSE OBLIGE (1981) soundtracked by Frank Sinatra’s “Young at Heart,” which Sonbert features in THE TENTH LEGION:

Furthermore, the cover image of Navarro and Saldaña’s book (visible on the left) is a still from THE TENTH LEGION, which shows Dorsky and Hiler working together at an editing table. Sonbert is also mentioned several times throughout Illuminated Hours.

Since 1995, GME President Jon Gartenberg has worked to further Sonbert’s legacy through a comprehensive program of preservation, distribution, programming, and publishing. In 2015, Gartenberg was Guest Editor of a special issue of Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media that comprised a dossier of writings by Sonbert himself on film, music, art, poetry, and travel. GME has recently re-teamed with Framework to release a second dossier, featuring contemporaneous writings about Sonbert’s early films; as well, a project has been underway to make Sonbert’s films available in digital formats, so as to make this artist’s films available to a wider international audience.