David Gatten Movies

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 landscapes and human politics can each re-interpret...

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.

"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 Spontaneous Nature (ca. third century CE) by Ge...

"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 destinies, filled with figures at once buried deep and...

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 result of the oceanic inscriptions written directly...

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

3 minutes, black and white, silent, 16mm

10 minutes, color, silent, 16mm

"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 in Chicago with some abandoned candy, and a...

“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

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 during the early 18th century. —David Gatten

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 the one who mends my rips; from the next film in...

"Excerpts from Sir Thomas Browne's 1658 text Hydriotaphia Urne-Buriall Or, A Brief Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk are superimposed with the stone faces of grave markers and burial urns. This image-text bookends a series of objects framed in the ancient glass window...

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 predestination, a momentary fulfillment, a trail...

Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Concentrate your attention. What Question will you ask? The Matter Propounded... makes use of an early 20th-century “Tablet of Jupiter” system for attempting to tell one’s future. The film invites viewers to make their own suppositions about the...

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, seven ways to listen. Time is measured out but...

"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, where recursive shifting of once seemingly...

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.

“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 ‘Of Mere Being’ translated into Ogham...

The last time I had dinner with Peter we spoke of sunsets – both sunsets we had experienced and sunsets we had filmed – and, of course, of boats; shrimp boats in particular. We made a plan to share with each other all the rolls of all the sunsets we'd never put into our films. That was November...