Devotional Cinema - Nathaniel Dorsky

Devotional Cinema by Nathaniel Dorsky was a short but very intense read. I would have really enjoyed hearing Dorsky read this as a lecture because of how passionate he seem about film and how it resonates in our lives. Saying that, I do not think all of what he said will directly apply to my filmmaking experience with my animation for 495. I tried to take apart smaller sections of the lecture and apply them to my little 5 minutes rotoscope.
The section that interested me the most was titled Alchemy. This reminded me of a section of The Waking Life called “The Holy Moment”. Dorsky says, “For alchemy to take place in a film, the form must include the expression of its own materiality, and this materiality must be in union with its subject matter.” This sounds to me like exactly what the character taking about the holy moment was trying to explain only in more literal terms. He says the best scripts don’t make the best films because they have a literary form in the first place. He says the best films are not tied to the mold slavishly.
I think this idea of letting form and materiality reign over coherence could help me in my quest to make an animation about water that ‘flows’ the way I want it to. I do want the form and subject matter to mesh the way Dorsky explains. Although he speaks of films being life altering and creating this deep emotion for people to come out of the theater completely vulnerable and changed, in some ways I want that on a smaller scale. I want people to leave my animation with a sense of weightlessness and serenity at least in a visual sense. I want the film to be seamless just as water is.
Dorsky also used the example of how in cave paintings early humans used the recessions in the wall to create depth with a two dimensional drawings. We have always been trying to create things of relevance that will out live our shorts human lives. I think this becomes so true in the case of animation due to the fact you are literally creating something out of nothing. I think this is why animation meshes so well with the realm of dreams and imagination, (to state the obvious.) Although I am tracing frames of human movement, with this film I want to try and break away from the literal and let my drawing flow with my subject matter more closely to tell the story.
I think the point of Dorsky’s lecture is for us to let this idea of materiality hold more weight that an attempt to cage up story telling through a ‘coherent’, ‘understandable’ timeline. Although he was not talking about animation the same rules seem to be very helpful to a confused filmmaker.