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...

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

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

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

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...

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

10 minutes, color, silent, 16mm

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 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...

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,...

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

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

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...

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

Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Concentrate your attention. What Question will you ask? The Matter Propounded... makes use of an early...

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....

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

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

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...

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