Nathaniel Dorsky & Jerome Hiler

Nathaniel Dorsky is an American experimental filmmaker and editor whose silent 16mm films transform everyday encounters with light, color, nature, and city life into a contemplative form of cinema. Working primarily with a handheld Bolex camera, Dorsky developed an approach to editing he calls “polyvalent montage,” in which images resonate through rhythm and association rather than conventional narrative. His films include Alaya, Triste, Compline, the Arboretum Cycle, and Hours for Jerome, his intimate portrait of life with his longtime partner, filmmaker Jerome Hiler. Hours for Jerome was added to the National Film Registry in 2012. Dorsky is also the author of Devotional Cinema, an influential meditation on film’s capacity to deepen perception and create an experience of transcendence. His work has been presented internationally and was featured in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and a major joint retrospective with Hiler at the Museum of Modern Art in 2024.

nathanieldorsky.net

Jerome Hiler is an American filmmaker, painter, and stained-glass artist whose luminous 16mm films explore the poetic possibilities of color, rhythm, memory, and projected light. Originally trained as a painter, Hiler became immersed in experimental cinema in 1960s New York, working as an assistant to filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos and drawing inspiration from artists including Marie Menken and Stan Brakhage. Although he continued filming for decades, Hiler long reserved his work for informal screenings among friends; his films began reaching wider audiences in the late 1990s. Works such as In the Stone House, New Shores, Words of Mercury, and Careless Passage reveal a cinema at once intimate and visionary. His parallel practice in stained glass—and his study of medieval windows as an early art of projected light—informed Cinema Before 1300, his illustrated lecture and subsequent film. Hiler participated in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and was celebrated alongside his longtime partner Nathaniel Dorsky in MoMA’s 2024 retrospective Illuminated Hours.