Triste (1996)

Interesting facts

Triste is a 1996 American avant-garde silent short film directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. It is the first in a set of "Four Cinematic Songs", which also includes Variations, Arbor Vitae, and Love's Refrain.

Production

Since the 1960s, Dorsky had operated by shooting footage without a specific use in mind and then editing films together from the available shots. The footage in Triste was taken in San Francisco from 1975 to 1985, during a period when he was teaching film production at the San Francisco Art Institute. He used a Bolex 16 mm camera, shooting primarily on Kodachrome stock.

During the 1980s, Dorsky shifted focus in his subsequent films to experiments with the color and grain of different film stocks. It was not until 1990 that he began editing what would become Triste. He remarked that "for a while, for some strange reason, I couldn't go forward until I had solved all the problems of all the footage I had ever addressed with my camera."

The editing process for Triste took five years. He showed much of the unedited footage to Warren Sonbert in 1995, who was bed-ridden during the final weeks of his life due to complications from AIDS. Dorsky had trouble coming up with a title for the film. He asked his partner Jerome Hiler while they were at the Imperial Tea Court, and Hiler suggested calling it Triste (French for 'sad') since the film dealt with sadness.

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