in 2023 In New York, Dorsky was exposed to the local experimental film scene and made a trilogy of films about his childhood. Shortly after premiering the first film of the trilogy,
Ingreen, he met Jerome Hiler at
the Film-Makers' Cooperative. He won an
Emmy Award for the film
Gauguin in Tahiti: Search for Paradise which was directed by Martin Carr in 1967.
Ralph Steiner hired Dorsky to edit three of his final films:
A Look at Laundry,
Beyond Niagara, and
Look Park. Dorsky continued shooting footage during his time in New Jersey but stopped editing and releasing films for many years. Both were projectionists and programmers at the local branch of the Sussex County Area Reference Library, which commissioned them to make an
industrial film. The resulting piece
Library features a minimalist soundtrack by
Tony Conrad and narration by
Beverly Grant. Dorsky and Hiler stayed in New Jersey until 1971 when they moved to San Francisco. In the early 1980s, he edited his films from living at Lake Owassa to make
Hours for Jerome, a two-part film structured around the seasons. He experimented with
silent speed in making the film, and since then he has made silent films which are screened at a reduced frame rate. Dorsky's other short films from the 1980s concentrated on the
film grain, texture, and color. Dorsky shot a series of seven films at the
San Francisco Botanical Garden in 2017. These comprise the
Arboretum Cycle, which captures the natural light propagating through plants at the arboretum over the course of a year. Dorsky was a visiting instructor at Princeton University in 2008 and he has been the recipient of many awards including a
Guggenheim Fellowship 1997 and grants from the
National Endowment of the Arts, two from the Rockefeller Foundation, and one from the LEF Foundation, the
Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the
California Arts Council. He has presented films at the
Museum of Modern Art, the
Centre Pompidou, the Tate Modern, the Filmoteca Española, Madrid, the Prague Film Archive, the Vienna Film Museum, the
Pacific Film Archive, the
Harvard Film Archive, Princeton University, Yale University, and frequently exhibits new work at the
New York Film Festival's Views from the Avant-Garde and the Wavelengths program of the
Toronto International Film Festival. In spring 2012 Dorsky took actively part in the three-month exposition of
Whitney Biennial. The
2015 New York Film Festival honored his work with a thirty four film complete retrospective at Lincoln Center. Manohla Dargis of the
New York Times listed this retrospective in second place in her list of the top ten films of 2015. Dorsky's films are available only as
16 mm film prints and are distributed by
Canyon Cinema in San Francisco and
Light Cone in Paris. Prints of stills from his films are available at the
Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, and the Peter Blum Gallery, New York City. ==Style==