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Hours for Jerome
Hours for Jerome is a 1982 American silent experimental film in two parts by Nathaniel Dorsky. It captures daily events from Dorsky's life with his partner, artist Jerome Hiler, around Lake Owassa in New Jersey and in Manhattan. These are presented in 66 sequences of disparate images, separated from each other by black leader. The film is structured around the four seasons, with Part 1 showing spring and summer while Part 2 revolves around fall and winter.
The material for Hours for Jerome was filmed from 1966 to 1970. However, Dorsky had difficulty editing it and shelved the footage before returning to it years later. He released the completed film in December 1982 and restored it in 1998, slightly condensing it in the process. Hours for Jerome is Dorsky's earliest endeavor toward developing his distinct style of polyvalent montage, an approach inspired by the early writings of poet John Ashbery. Critics have compared the film's ardent depiction of everyday life to traditional books of hours, an association invoked by its title. The film was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2012.
Hours for Jerome is divided into two parts structured around the four seasons. Part 1 shows spring and summer, while Part 2 revolves around fall and winter. Each part consists of many shorter sequences of images, or stanzas, separated by black leader. Part 1 comprises 28 stanzas, and Part 2 has 38.
The content of the film's images is wide-ranging, with no established narrative or explicit connections between successive images. For example, one stanza depicts a woman sitting in a park, people shown in silhouette at an aquarium, two rhinoceroses at a zoo, and a plane in the sky. Other stanzas contain only a single shot. The film opens with an extended shot of a sunrise seen through trees and closes with a black-and-white shot taken from a car driving into Manhattan. Poets Anne Waldman and Michael Brownstein appear briefly in the film, in a pastiche of driving scenes made using rear projection.
Prior to shooting Hours for Jerome, Dorsky had made Ingreen, A Fall Trip Home, and Summerwind, a trilogy dealing with adolescence and small-town life, during the mid-1960s. He continued recording footage after Summerwind, and the earliest images used in Hours for Jerome were captured in 1966, showing the same forest from his previous film in winter. Dorsky was originally interested in exploring "the deep and mysterious power of the life force in the forest". He filmed near Lake Owassa in rural New Jersey, where he and his partner Jerome Hiler lived, and in New York City, where they had an apartment.
Dorsky filmed with a Bolex 16 mm camera, equipped with an Angénieux telephoto lens. He shot on various reversal film stocks, primarily Kodachrome II. Kodachrome was known for creating intense, saturated color, and Dorsky managed to increase the contrast through underexposure. He also revised the color by intentionally distorting the balance during the color timing process.
Dorsky began editing the footage, producing the more conspicuous jump cuts and rapid intercutting seen in Hours for Jerome. However, an overall design for a film did not emerge during this period. As a result, he finished shooting in 1970 and the material was shown only to friends, in private home screenings. The following year, Dorsky moved with Hiler to San Francisco. He experienced a severe creative block and found it difficult to edit, due to the difference in environmental conditions and distance from longstanding social connections. He considered the project a failure and shelved the footage.
In 1978, poet Larry Fagin, whom Dorsky had known in New York, visited him in San Francisco. Fagin had not seen the footage before, so Dorsky retrieved and projected it. He was inspired to construct a film out of the material, which he found "quite haunting…because it seemed that it came from the simplicity of my heart, from a simple attempt to show very sincere things". He spent 1980 to 1982 editing the footage. He began by separating it into four groups for the different seasons. This allowed him to work on a smaller scale and made the editing process more manageable. He edited each season separately, cycling through them by spending a week at a time on one before revisiting the next.
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Hours for Jerome
Hours for Jerome is a 1982 American silent experimental film in two parts by Nathaniel Dorsky. It captures daily events from Dorsky's life with his partner, artist Jerome Hiler, around Lake Owassa in New Jersey and in Manhattan. These are presented in 66 sequences of disparate images, separated from each other by black leader. The film is structured around the four seasons, with Part 1 showing spring and summer while Part 2 revolves around fall and winter.
The material for Hours for Jerome was filmed from 1966 to 1970. However, Dorsky had difficulty editing it and shelved the footage before returning to it years later. He released the completed film in December 1982 and restored it in 1998, slightly condensing it in the process. Hours for Jerome is Dorsky's earliest endeavor toward developing his distinct style of polyvalent montage, an approach inspired by the early writings of poet John Ashbery. Critics have compared the film's ardent depiction of everyday life to traditional books of hours, an association invoked by its title. The film was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2012.
Hours for Jerome is divided into two parts structured around the four seasons. Part 1 shows spring and summer, while Part 2 revolves around fall and winter. Each part consists of many shorter sequences of images, or stanzas, separated by black leader. Part 1 comprises 28 stanzas, and Part 2 has 38.
The content of the film's images is wide-ranging, with no established narrative or explicit connections between successive images. For example, one stanza depicts a woman sitting in a park, people shown in silhouette at an aquarium, two rhinoceroses at a zoo, and a plane in the sky. Other stanzas contain only a single shot. The film opens with an extended shot of a sunrise seen through trees and closes with a black-and-white shot taken from a car driving into Manhattan. Poets Anne Waldman and Michael Brownstein appear briefly in the film, in a pastiche of driving scenes made using rear projection.
Prior to shooting Hours for Jerome, Dorsky had made Ingreen, A Fall Trip Home, and Summerwind, a trilogy dealing with adolescence and small-town life, during the mid-1960s. He continued recording footage after Summerwind, and the earliest images used in Hours for Jerome were captured in 1966, showing the same forest from his previous film in winter. Dorsky was originally interested in exploring "the deep and mysterious power of the life force in the forest". He filmed near Lake Owassa in rural New Jersey, where he and his partner Jerome Hiler lived, and in New York City, where they had an apartment.
Dorsky filmed with a Bolex 16 mm camera, equipped with an Angénieux telephoto lens. He shot on various reversal film stocks, primarily Kodachrome II. Kodachrome was known for creating intense, saturated color, and Dorsky managed to increase the contrast through underexposure. He also revised the color by intentionally distorting the balance during the color timing process.
Dorsky began editing the footage, producing the more conspicuous jump cuts and rapid intercutting seen in Hours for Jerome. However, an overall design for a film did not emerge during this period. As a result, he finished shooting in 1970 and the material was shown only to friends, in private home screenings. The following year, Dorsky moved with Hiler to San Francisco. He experienced a severe creative block and found it difficult to edit, due to the difference in environmental conditions and distance from longstanding social connections. He considered the project a failure and shelved the footage.
In 1978, poet Larry Fagin, whom Dorsky had known in New York, visited him in San Francisco. Fagin had not seen the footage before, so Dorsky retrieved and projected it. He was inspired to construct a film out of the material, which he found "quite haunting…because it seemed that it came from the simplicity of my heart, from a simple attempt to show very sincere things". He spent 1980 to 1982 editing the footage. He began by separating it into four groups for the different seasons. This allowed him to work on a smaller scale and made the editing process more manageable. He edited each season separately, cycling through them by spending a week at a time on one before revisiting the next.