Movies: David Gatten

Strips of previously unexposed film went into the ocean and these fragments are what returned. In this final installment of a nine year project documenting the underwater world off the coast of South Carolina, both the sounds and images are the resul...

3 minutes, black and white, silent, 16mm...

From dreamy aerial opening shots, we are sent on an expedition through the storied land of our fifth most populous state, Illinois, often called a miniature version of America. Deborah Stratman’s experimental documentary explores how physical landsca...

JOURNAL AND REMARKS, the second reel of the ongoing Continuous Quantities series, contains 700 shots, 29 frames each, shuttling between the 1839 version of what later became Charles Darwin’s A Voyage of the Beagle (1845) and images I gathered on a re...

In this film of textual quotations, words, like images, appear and dissipate, the spectator being unable to apprehend them. They are thus treated as matter and light, as a unit of time and at the same time of weight....

Footage of a logbook of shrimp boat names and the boats in question at the mouth of the Edisto river on the east coast of the US, edited into 300, 29-frame shots on 16mm. Edited in line with Leonardo da Vinci's instruction number 918 in which he subd...

A history of scarred surfaces, an inquiry, and an imagining: for the marks we see and the marks we make, for the languages we can read and for those we are trying to learn. Reproduced by hand on an old contact printer resulting in individual, unique ...

We search for focus, the evidence is thin, but like breath on a mirror it speaks of life and provides a compass for the way home....

Past visions of future utopias suggest a manner of movement to make one's way through life. Pigment and paint, sun and snow, ice and rain form figures on fixed-out filmstock. A Birthday Celebration, as Walt Whitman might have it, for the present, but...

There are two women. Or there were two women. Or there will be two women. One of them is here today. No one knows about tomorrow. There is one river, there are two oceans, three registers, four velocities, five planes of time, six expanses of space, ...

Paired texts as dueling histories; a journey imagined and remembered; 57 mileage markers produce an equal number of prospects. The latest in a series of films about the division of landscapes, objects, people, ideas and the Byrd family of Virginia du...

The result of a series of camera-less collaborations between the filmmaker, the Atlantic Ocean, and a crab trap. For three days in January and three days in October of 1997, and again, for a day, in August of 1998, lengths of unexposed, undeveloped f...

This timeless experimental film draws on the work of 17th century scientist Robert Boyle to present a varied combination of texts, objects, colours and textures. The traditional tone of the cinematic impressions takes us back into the past (evocation...

Four uncut camera rolls, unspooled intermittently across thirteen years. One is a portrait of a friend, another is of a particular plant, the third of one kind of family, the fourth of another kind; all of them photographed to mark a particular time ...

"Linked together by the texturality of forgotten objects and frayed (or physically manipulated) imprinted text images, the film represents a thematic collapsing of distinct objects that further erases the bounds between image (and text) from meaning,...

“A single piece of paper, a second stab at suture, a story three times over, a frame for every mile. With words by Charles Darwin. A long-distance dedication for a far-away friend halfway up the mountain.” —David Gatten...

A portrait of one of Gatten's mentors, the filmmaker Zack Stiglicz, filming on the shore of Lake Michigan....

A queer contemporary re-imagining of the Odyssey. Odysseus wracked with guilt for the loss of his crew returns home in search of a lost love. An experimental narrative told through still photographs, collage, video, found footage and animation....

10 minutes, color, silent, 16mm...

Plaintive fragments from a 19th-century fortune-telling manual used to pose a series of questions...