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...

Strips of previously unexposed film went into the ocean and these fragments are what returned. In this final installment of a nine year project...

Cut-glass gleaming, shards of vision interrupted, reformulated, and freshly shaped into a response to the power of words and their ability to both...

Suggestion is the rock, and the physical evidence is the evanescent spray that breaks against the unseen. Transitive enharmonics of things touching...

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...

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,...

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...

"The work deals with Taoist practices of Internal Alchemy and their accompanying texts. The inter-titles were mostly adapted from The Secret Text of...

"This chapter of my ongoing exploration of the Byrd library finds its name and shape within a single volume from that collection: Athanasius...

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...

"Linked together by the texturality of forgotten objects and frayed (or physically manipulated) imprinted text images, the film represents a thematic...

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...

This timeless experimental film draws on the work of 17th century scientist Robert Boyle to present a varied combination of texts, objects, colours...

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....

3 minutes, black and white, silent, 16mm

SHRIMP BOAT LOG, the first reel of the ongoing CONTINUOUS QUANTITIES series, contains 300 shots, 29 frames each, alternating between a notebook...

JOURNAL AND REMARKS, the second reel of the ongoing Continuous Quantities series, contains 700 shots, 29 frames each, shuttling between the 1839...

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...

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