Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises or the Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing

If cinema is the art form that has the closest relationship with time, or the illusion of shaping time –considering that cinema does not actually shape time, but uses duration as a way of creating a sensation that could affect the way in which we experience time– then the cinema of David Gatten might be in one of the highest echelons when we talk about artists who understand the moving image as a time-image. Granted, there are few filmmakers who have made their relationship with landscape and its own running-time their bread and butter–James Benning probably being the name that first comes to mind for many people–but what Gatten is establishing isn’t necessarily how long a landscape or an image can last; we could argue that his cinema is concerned with a different kind of time entirely, a different perception of it: interior time, time within a particular room, the individual, personal or temporal experience of time.

David Gatten’s way of dealing with spaces isn’t very different from Alvin Lucier's in his I Am Sitting in a Room, where through repetition and re-recording of a brief recitation, sound enters into a state of metamorphosis thanks to the acoustics of the room itself; humanising the vacuum so that the space  is the one that dictates the actual sound. It may seem like chance to some, but in fact, it takes a very deep understanding of surroundings, elements, negative space, the material that isn’t intervened directly,  to be able to reach that creative essence.

Gatten’s work is one that is closely related to writing and text (and therefore, reading), nevertheless, one of his earliest (and most important) films also deals with another kind of writing. What The Water Said, Nos. 1-3 (1998) is, according to the filmmaker himself, a collaboration between David and the sea: undeveloped rolls of film were thrown into the sea, the resulting images existing as a gesture of writing, rocks, salt, sea creatures and water having a kind of creative hand in the finished film. In an interview with Robert Zimmerman, Gatten tells how his first approach to film was through a workshop where he mistakenly didn’t expose the rolls of film properly. Some were stepped on and even bitten by a dog. He feared the films were potentially ruined, but nothing could be further from the truth. Looking at the projected film, Gatten was able to recognise each part of the process, including the stepping foot and the dog's teeth: "That's when I realised that film has a skin''. And just like the skin, the marks take on another dimension as time passes, after they have healed and become scars. His collaboration with the sea (the second part of What The Water Said was made nine years after the first one) involves waiting, expectation. Bringing the work back to its elements and trusting the results will, at the very least, be stimulating. Not exact, but adequate. Is it possible to anticipate with 100% certainty what the rolls will look after they are taken out of the sea?

Of course, there’s also writing in a more conventional sense –though the techniques aren’t conventional at all. Take, for example, Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises or the Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing (1999), in which Gatten placed bibles in boiling water so that he could use tape to remove texts from a page, and then apply them directly into the filmstrip – particularly in his series Secret History of the Dividing Line, where the films are detonated, or motivated, by the library of William Byrd II, a planter and man of letters, who possessed an enormous collection of books, where there are volumes ranging from scientific interest to manuals or code of conducts; in essence, a massive repertoire that contains anything and everything a gentleman should know and be. The films from this series might be the ones that better illustrate David Gatten’s peculiar relationship with time. 

The Great Art of Knowing (2004) starts as a sort of almanac of texts and writings pertaining to the cultivation of one’s own knowledge, an ideal of the intimate relationship between the text and the person reading it. Little by little, diary entries by William Byrd II and eventually his daughter Evelyn become more present, and then we see letters from Evelyn to his lover, whom she can’t see again. Joining the texts, or splitting time with them, are images of refracted light through a bottle. Textures of magnified words turn into high contrast hieroglyphics giving them a flickering film-like quality, shadows over paper, over book pages, the corners of a room. The film has two different sets of rhythms; the force of the written word, the exultation of knowledge, and the stillness and stoicism that’s a result of the doomed love story being presented to us. 

What the Water Said, Nos. 1-3

Nine years separate The Great Art of Knowing and What Places of Heaven, What Planets Directed, How Long the Effects? or, The General Accidents of the World (2013), in which David once again returns to Evelyn's letters, to the same room, his room, the same bottles, the same window. Gatten goes from black and white to color in transition so subtle and gentle that it feels like the sun decided to shine a soft light over the texts so they can be read more clearly. The camera movements and the transitions are slower, more tender than in The Great Art of Knowing, as if nine years of distance has indeed made a difference. The change from black and white to colour, not as a fantasy, dream-like state of living tones, but rather as a way of making us aware of the fact that these memories are still there, but in a different way, in a different shape and colour, that love remains despite distance and obstacles; and as for the film itself, our projects never cease to exist, they never leave our inner life. There are moments, gestures, feelings and thoughts that are engraved in particular places forever and to return to those concepts means to inhabit these places once again, another place in time, inside our minds, a place we will invariably visit constantly for the rest of our lives. 

The Extravagant Shadows (2012) is Gatten's longest film to date, and it's ambitious and demanding. Large paragraphs and blocks of text fill the screen, but most importantly, or at least as importantly as the words, a brush literally paints the image within the frame, leaving the shot to allow the paint to dry over time, only to paint over the same surface again and see the image change, the remaining traces and tones, all aided by the flexibility of recording that digital cinema offers.

In these texts there is a narrative, a story, another lost love, the search for a book and also, the way in which sound reverberates in a particular space. Without revealing too much about the wonders this film delivers, I can safely say that it consists and exists thanks to the unlikely balance between a domestic act against the expansive and extraordinary narrative it presents. Colors become tales, sparks of literature summoned and motivated by the stroke of a brush. In the last third of the film, there is a scene in which a character finds a book that is familiar to her, this encounter awakens a series of emotions motivated by a long wait, an intoxicating anticipation, symptoms of profound and absolute devotion. A book that passes from hand to hand, having waited years for the right hands, for the right eyes to read it. Sometimes gathering dust, remaining motionless, intact, but present nevertheless, it's an object in this world all the same. The pages are frail yet more valuable for the hands that hold the volume, for it requires delicate attention and care. Gatten treats his work, his cinema, his films in this way. They are long-breath projects, pieces that have a configuration that closely resembles the many years that the volumes last. The ideas remain. The book hasn’t been forgotten, the thoughts are still waiting to take flight. They are fluttering inside, and when David returns to them, he grabs them and turns them into a film, the result an exquisite work, one that has benefitted from patience, from waiting.

The Extravagant Shadows