David Gatten Movies

An unexpected letter leads to an unanticipated encounter. Some windows open easily; other shadows remain locked rooms. Have a cup of tea dear....

Four uncut camera rolls, unspooled intermittently across thirteen years. One is a portrait of a friend, another is of a particular plant, the third...

"Excerpts from Sir Thomas Browne's 1658 text Hydriotaphia Urne-Buriall Or, A Brief Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk are...

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...

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

Paired texts as dueling histories; a journey imagined and remembered; 57 mileage markers produce an equal number of prospects. The latest in a series...

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...

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

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

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

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...

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

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

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...

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

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...

3 minutes, black and white, silent, 16mm

“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...

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....

“A companion of sorts to WHAT THE WATER SAID. An attempt to assess the potentials, possibilities and pitfalls of finding meaning in – or...