17 Reasons Why

August 2026 March 2025 17 Reasons Why screenshot.jpg A screenshot from the film Nathaniel Dorsky Canyon Cinema 1987 10 6 19 minutes United States Silent 17 Reasons Why is a 1987 American avant-garde short film directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. Working with a collection of secondhand portable cameras, Dorsky used the unslit 8 mm footage to create a split screen with four quadrants. Normally screened on 16 mm film at 16 frames per second, it is one of Dorsky's few works to have been shown as a digital transfer. Description 17 Reasons Why is divided into twenty segments, each around one minute long.Marín 2023 179–182 The content of these segments varies between landscapes, interior scenes, faces, extreme close-ups of objects, and color fields. These are sometimes combined through multiple exposures. The film divides the screen into four quadrants. The top and bottom images are offset by a single frame.Kleinhans Chuck February 1988 Margin notes Afterimage 15 7 21 10.1525/aft.1988.15.7.21 The left and right sides usually use different shots but sometimes show the same image out of sync.Taubin Amy Amy Taubin October 20, 1987 Being Here Now The Village Voice 37 42 76 Production thumb|Double 8 mm film is made by shooting along each side of a 16 mm film strip and splitting it in half during development. Dorsky used unslit Double 8 to create a 16 mm film with four images per frame. The split screen in 17 Reasons Why was produced through Double 8, a technique common within experimental cinema during the 1970s.https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/nathaniel-dorsky-shimmering-golden-music Nathaniel Dorsky: Shimmering Golden Music Proctor Maximilien Luc February 15, 2022 Notebook December 16, 2023 Double 8 mm film uses a single film strip that is 16 mm wide. Only half the width is exposed at any given time, and the camera operator flips the roll once one side is complete. When the roll is developed, the strip is slit along the center to separate it into two 8 mm strips. To create the quadrisected image, Dorsky created a 16 mm strip from printing the unslit 8 mm strips, such that each 16 mm frame contains four smaller 8 mm frames.Wolff Kurt February 1988 Filming Grains of Sand San Francisco Bay Guardian 30MacDonald 2006 88 Dorsky made the film using old 8 mm cameras he purchased secondhand.Ahlgren Calvin October 4, 1987 Making an Art Form of Chemical Breakdown San Francisco Chronicle 37 To prevent the two sides of the strip from facing different directions, he held the camera upside down when shooting the second side of each roll. His use of multiple cameras and film stocks produced different colors, textures, and gate shapes in the resulting footage.Sicinski 2010 269 He spliced together twenty rolls of film. Each segment would normally contain around four minutes of footage, but the use of unslit film shortened that to less than one minute, giving the final work a fast tempo unusual in Dorsky's work.Marín 2023 179Nelson Max July 2016 Heavenly Host https://www.filmcomment.com/article/nathaniel-dorsky-heavenly-host/ Film Comment 52 4 53 December 16, 2023 The title 17 Reasons Why comes from a rooftop sign at 17th and Mission Street which appears in the film.Sicinski 2010 269 Release The film premiered on October 6, 1987, at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, in a program with Pneuma and Alaya. It screened on October 20 at the Collective for Living Cinema in New York. Dorsky requests the film be projected at 16 frames per second, slightly slower than the 18 fps frame rate of his other films or the 24 fps frame rate of typical sound films, to emphasize the articulation of individual frames. 17 Reasons Why is one of few films by Dorsky to have been presented digitally. A 2019 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Private Lives Public Spaces, featured 100 works of "artist's cinema, amateur movies, and family filmmaking". 17 Reasons Why was presented on a digital screen in front of a dark background at the exhibition's entrance, in addition to two 16 mm screenings. MoMA had wanted to show the film as a 16 mm loop, but the wear and tear would have destroyed the print. Dorsky was concerned that rendering the film at 16 frames per second would require the insertion of duplicate frames, which would interfere with its single-frame effects. Upon seeing the installation of the digital version, Dorsky remarked that it "has less feeling of body and light, delicacy of color, and tenderness of fragile beauty" than the film version but that he was "very pleasantly surprised with how good the MoMA technicians made the film look in its own newly acquired digital terms."https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6610-archived-and-revived Archived and Revived Hudson David September 27, 2019 The Criterion Collection December 16, 2023https://nathanieldorsky.net/post/187819079713/17-reasons-why-by-nathaniel-dorsky-is-the 17 Reasons Why by Nathaniel Dorsky is the welcoming moving image for MoMA's new installation Dorsky Nathaniel September 22, 2019 December 16, 2023 Reception Critic Amy Taubin described the film as "lively, glittering, and mysterious", writing that it "has the surprise and resonance of accomplished ensemble jazz improvisation." References Bibliography MacDonald Scott Scott MacDonald (media scholar) 2006 A Critical Cinema 5: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers University of California Press 978-0-520-93908-0 Marín Pablo Algarín Navarro Francisco Saldaña Carlos 2023 Illuminated Hours: The Early Cinema of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler Asociación Lumière Sunset Sucks: Some Reasons for the Beauty of 17 Reasons Why 978-8-4940-9766-9 Sicinski Michael Anker Steve Geritz Kathy Seid Steve 2010 Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000 University of California Press The Bay Area as Cinematic Space in Twenty-five Stops or Less 978-0-520-24911-0 External links 17 Reasons Why at Nathaniel Dorsky's official site 17 Reasons Why at Canyon Cinema Category:1987 films Category:1987 short films Category:1987 American films Category:1980s avant-garde and experimental films Category:American avant-garde and experimental short films Category:American silent short films Category:Films directed by Nathaniel Dorsky Category:Non-narrative films Category:Silent films in color Category:Surviving American silent films Category:1990s silent films