David Gatten

Born: 1971-02-11, Ann Arbor, Michigan

Biography

David Edward Gatten (Born February 11, 1971, Ann Arbor, Michigan) is an American experimental filmmaker and moving image artist. Since 1996 Gatten's films have explored the intersection of the printed word and moving image, cataloguing the variety of ways in which texts function in cinema as both language and image, often blurring the boundary between these categories. His 16mm films often employ cameraless techniques, combined with close-up cinematography and optical printing processes. In addition to the ongoing 16mm films, Gatten is now making hybrid 16mm/digital works and has completed an entirely digital feature-length project called The Extravagant Shadows. Among other projects, they are currently working on a series of films entitled Secret History of the Dividing Line, a True Account in Nine Parts, a project which Artforum magazine called "one of the most erudite and ambitious undertakings in recent cinema." He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005 to continue work on this series of films exploring the library of William Byrd II of Westover (1674–1744) and the lives of William Byrd and their daughter Evelyn Byrd (1707–1737). [Wikipedia]

Filmography

• Silver Align (1995)
• Hardwood Process (1996)
• The Spirit Lamp (2025)
• The Extravagant Shadows (2012)
• Odysseus and the Oceanic Feeling (2017)
• By Pain and Rhyme and Arabesques of Foraging (2013)
• What The Water Said, Nos. 1-3 (1998)
• So Sure of Nowhere Buying Times to Come (2010)
• The Enjoyment of Reading, Lost and Found (2001)
• What Places of Heaven, What Planets Directed, How Long the Effects? or, The General Accidents of the World (2013)
• The Illinois Parables (2016)
• Film for Invisible Ink case no. 71: BASE-PLUS-FOG (2006)
• Film for Invisible Ink, case no. 323. Once Upon a Time in the West (2010)
• This Day’s Madness did prepare Tomorrow’s Silence (2021)
• Rete: Red Hook, Brooklyn (2008)
• Shrimp Boat Log (2006)
• Secret History of the Dividing Line (2002)
• Film for Invisible Ink, Case No. 142: ABBREVIATION FOR DEAD WINTER [Diminished by 1,794] (2008)
• Narrow Rivers, Open Seas & Seventeen Sunsets (Silences for A Merchant Mariner) (2018)
• The Matter Propounded, of Its Possibility and Impossibility, Treated in Four Parts (2011)
• Fragrant Portals, Bright Particulars and the Edge of Space (2003)
• Journals and Remarks (2009)
• Crossing Brooklyn Ferry (2015)
• How to Conduct a Love Affair (2007)
• Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises or the Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing (1999)
• Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (2016)
• The Heart is the Residence of the Spirit (2019)
• The Great Art of Knowing (2004)
• What The Water Said, Nos. 4-6 (2007)