David Gatten

Known for DirectingBorn 1971-02-11 (age 55)Ann Arbor, Michigan

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]Read more

Movies & web series

Hardwood Process

The Illinois Parables

What Places of Heaven, What Planets Directed, How Long the Effects? or, The General Accidents of the World

So Sure of Nowhere Buying Times to Come

What The Water Said, Nos. 4-6

How to Conduct a Love Affair

What The Water Said, Nos. 1-3

The Extravagant Shadows

Secret History of the Dividing Line

Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises or the Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing

The Spirit Lamp

This Day’s Madness did prepare Tomorrow’s Silence

The Heart is the Residence of the Spirit

Narrow Rivers, Open Seas & Seventeen Sunsets (Silences for A Merchant Mariner)

Odysseus and the Oceanic Feeling

Intermission

China monumentis (A Roll for Peter)

Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

By Pain and Rhyme and Arabesques of Foraging

The Matter Propounded, of Its Possibility and Impossibility, Treated in Four Parts

Film for Invisible Ink, case no. 323. Once Upon a Time in the West

Ordinary Time, Equivocal Inventory

Journals and Remarks

Film for Invisible Ink, Case No. 142: ABBREVIATION FOR DEAD WINTER [Diminished by 1,794]

Today! (excerpts)

Today! (excerpts #28 and #19)

Today!

Shrimp Boat Log

Film for Invisible Ink case no. 71: BASE-PLUS-FOG

The Great Art of Knowing

Fragrant Portals, Bright Particulars and the Edge of Space

The Enjoyment of Reading, Lost and Found

Silver Align