Movies: David Gatten

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...

Suggestion is the rock, and the physical evidence is the evanescent spray that breaks against the unseen. Transitive enharmonics of things touching in middair, an air which is Time—not an actual intersection, but with a consequence as powerful as pre...

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....

Cut-glass gleaming, shards of vision interrupted, reformulated, and freshly shaped into a response to the power of words and their ability to both describe and create sensations of outer worlds and inner realities. A movie made on the occasion of th...

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, ...

"The work deals with Taoist practices of Internal Alchemy and their accompanying texts. The inter-titles were mostly adapted from The Secret Text of Green Fluorescence (ca. eleventh century CE) by Zhang Boudan and The Book of the Master Who Embraces ...

“A companion of sorts to WHAT THE WATER SAID. An attempt to assess the potentials, possibilities and pitfalls of finding meaning in – or assigning human meaning to – the natural world; by way of Wallace Stevens. ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ and ‘O...

Four short interludes on filmmaking, chemistry, the American West and interplanetary communications....

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 ...

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....

A limited-run performance of songs written by David Lynch and Chrystabell, with Chrystabell performing the material to tracks of David’s instrumentation, enveloped in the stunning organic images created specifically for The Spirit Lamp by internation...

A closely watched candle and an invitation to the dance. William Byrd booms among his books while Evelyn keeps to a quiet window; the volunteer fire brigade sorts through the ashes and Isaac Goldberg tells it like it is. Who read what; when, and why?...

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

Film for Invisible Ink, case no. 323: ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (2010), was composed as an epithalamium, or matrimonial poem, for Erin Espelie. Bringing together Western Union Telegraphic Code and Francis Bacon’s list of twenty-seven privileged in...

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...

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...

SHRIMP BOAT LOG, the first reel of the ongoing CONTINUOUS QUANTITIES series, contains 300 shots, 29 frames each, alternating between a notebook listing the names of shrimp boats that frequent the mouth of the Edisto River and images of these same boa...

"This chapter of my ongoing exploration of the Byrd library finds its name and shape within a single volume from that collection: Athanasius Kircher's 17th century encyclopedia, THE GREAT ART OF KNOWING. Herein find tangled texts and crossed destinie...

"Starring Jessie Stead as ‘one of the filmmakers’ and assorted plastic receptacles. Transmutations of small ideas occur in random locations (two of which are exotic). Highlights include cameo appearances by the United States Postal Service, a dance i...

An unexpected letter leads to an unanticipated encounter. Some windows open easily; other shadows remain locked rooms. Have a cup of tea dear. I’ll trade you a stitch from the past for a leaf from the future. This is a Valentine and a fragment: for t...