Alaya

Alaya (1987)

Sand, wind, and light intermingle with the emulsions. The viewer is the star.

Date of release
1987-12-07
TMDB
8.0 / 10 (2)
Runtime
28m
Director
Nathaniel Dorsky

Interesting facts

Alaya is a 1987 American avant-garde silent short film directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. It shows sand filmed in different ways.

Production

Dorsky used a combination of film stocks, in color and in black and white, that he had collected during the 1970s. He shot the earliest footage for Alaya while visiting friends in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. To attain extreme magnification of individual grains of sand, he made use of extension tubes.

Dorsky set up a makeshift soundstage in the cellar of his home. He placed his camera on a tripod with an aperture around f/11. Because he was using multiple extension tubes, a large depth of field was required to keep entire grains in focus. Two photofloods provided the amount of light needed for this, which heated the lens of his camera enough that he could not touch it.

Alaya was inspired by a Buddhist teacher. It is named after alaya, a Buddhist term for what Dorsky described as "perception without concept".

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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