David Gatten

American film director

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, cataloging the variety of ways in which texts functions in cinema as both language and image, often blurring the boundary between these categories. His 16mm films often employee 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, he is 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." 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 his daughter Evelyn Byrd (1707–1737). In November 2011 Texts of Light: A Mid Career Retrospective of Fourteen Films by David Gatten, curated by Chris Stults, opened at the Wexner Center for the Arts. The three program retrospective screened in 2012 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; Harvard Film Archive; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and other venues in San Francesco; and at REDCAT, The LA Film Forum, and The Velaslavasay Panorama in Los Angeles. Two of Gatten's newest works premiered in the Fall of 2012. The Extravagant Shadows is a 175 minute work of high definition digital cinema. It premiered at Lincoln Center in the New York Film Festival. A hybrid 16mm/HD piece, By Pain and Rhyme and Arabesques of Foraging premiered at the British Film Institute in the London Film Festival and nominated for the Tiger award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Gatten is currently a Professor of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts in the Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Images Arts at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and a regular Visiting Artist to the MFA in Experimental & Documentary Arts program at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

Gatten was born on February 11, 1971, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Robert and Florence Gatten. He lived in Michigan and Ohio until 1978, when the family moved to Greensboro, North Carolina. Gatten's interest in the moving image originated in the mid 1980s, while in junior high school, when he began writing video game software with the TRS 80 operating system.

To produce What the Water Said, Nos.1 3, Gatten placed unexposed rolls of camera film in crab traps in the Atlantic Ocean off the South Carolina coast. The resulting sounds and images were produced by the physical and chemical interactions between the film's emulsion and the surrounding salt water, sand, rocks, crabs, fish, and underwater creatures. Gatten's previous film, Hardwood Process, takes the shape of a diary and also explored the "secret writing" of nature, combined with hand processing of the 16mm film stock, use of natural dyes, toners, chemical treatments, optical and contact printing. Gatten's rarely screened first film, Silver Align, is a portrait of one of Gatten's mentors, the filmmaker Zack Stiglicz, filming on the shore of Lake Michigan.

Since 1996, Gatten has been at work on a nine part film series that takes as inspiration the 4,000 volume library of William Byrd II, an American colonial writer, planter, and government official. The individual films explore one or more titles from the library while also elliptically describing episodes in the lives of Byrd and his daughter Evelyn. At least four parts were completed; the fifth part was in progress between 2005 and 2009. The series has been credited as having a "unique approach" to biography, filmmakers Hollis Frampton, Robert Beavers and Stan Brakhage; poets Susan Howe and in 2011 all four completed parts were included in "The Unfinished Film" exhibition at the Gladstone Gallery, alongside works by Joseph Cornell, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Luc Godard, Dziga Vertov, and Andy Warhol.

In addition to the Secret History films, Gatten is working on two additional film series, one under the umbrella title Films for Invisible Ink, and including the films Case No. 71: Base Plus Fog and Case No. 142: Abbreviation for Dead Winter [diminished by 1,794], as well as "the wedding vows film" Case No. 323: Once upon a Time in the West. Another series titled Continuous Quantities, that includes the films Journal and Remarks, filmed on the Galapagos Islands and Shrimp Boat Log. Based on an entry from Leonardo da Vinci's Notebooks, the Continuous Quantities films are composed of shots 29 frames (1.2 seconds) in length. In addition to his work in Vienna, Gatten's films were the subject of a recent retrospective at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, South Korea. In 2016 he completed three new 16mm films.