David Gatten
- Professor
"The films of David Gatten brand the brain and the retina with equal force. They consist partly of cerebral puzzles and partly of lyrical reveries, and their central drama lies in the space between, where facts transform into poetry and transient experiences are assimilated into systems of knowledge. As they construct around them gigantic conceptual edifices, his films contain sequences that decompose mental activity, obliterate the formation of thoughts. No Hollywood director, no matter how big their budget, offers images as carefully calibrated as Gatten’s."
– Tom McCormack, Moving Image Source
Since 1992, the films of David Gatten (b. 1971, Ann Arbor, Michigan) have consistently explored the intersection of the printed word and moving image. The resulting body of work illuminates a wide array of historical, conceptual, and material concerns, while cataloging the variety of ways in which texts function in cinema as both language and image, often blurring the boundary between these categories. These movies measure the movement of desire across distance, and the manner in which books, letters, telegrams, and other written, printed, or electronic communications might both produce and mediate that distance.
A 2005 Guggenheim Fellow, Gatten's films have received over 120 international solo exhibitions, and screened in over 1100 film festivals and group shows around the world.
His latest major work is a collaboration with the singer, musician, and actor Chrystabell. The Spirit Lamp is comprised of eight songs written and recorded by David Lynch and Chrystabell over the last 20 years, forming the basis for eight new moving image works by Gatten, serving as both lighting and a visual “cocoon” for Chrystabell’s live performance. The Spirit Lamp is a limited-run, numbered edition of 22 shows that premiered at the official David Lynch Tribute at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. In the Fall of 2025 The Spirit Lamp can be seen at exhibitions in European cities including Paris, London, Edinburgh, Prague, Lisbon, Amsterdam, and Antwerp.
A 2025 poll naming the 50 Best Experimental Filmmakers of the 21st c. ranked Gatten at No. 8 and included three of his movies in the top 50 films of the 21st c.
16mm Films
Using traditional research methods (reading old books) and non-traditional film processes (boiling old books) the films trace the contours of private lives and public histories, combining philosophy, biography and poetry with experiments in cinematic forms and narrative structures. Exploring the archive in unusual ways and making connections across categories of knowledge and fields of meaning, Gatten's movies construct new compositions and generate unexpected conclusions from 19th c. scientific treatises, "out-dated" 20th c. instructional texts, and rare books from 18th c. personal libraries.
In 1996 Gatten initiated his six-part film series What the Water Said, in which strands of raw filmstock were placed underwater in crab traps for various lengths of time, allowing the film emulsion to react to the physical and chemical environment of the water at the intersection of the Atlantic Ocean and the Edisto River. These films remain some of his most frequently screened works, appearing on film history syllabi at universities in the US, Canada, and Europe.
In 1999 Gatten premiered Moxon's Mechanick Exercises, or The Doctrine of Handy-works Applied to the Art of Printing, the first of the films in the Secret History of the Dividing Line project exploring the personal library of William Byrd II and the life of his daughter Evelyn Byrd. For this film Gatten developed a tape-and-ink lift-transfer process for removing letters, words, and phrases from their paper base and registering them on 16mm clear leader, then manipulating them using a contact printer of his own invention, a JK optical printer, and an A-B-C-D roll editing process. These image-making processes subsequently became the foundation for both the material explorations and the aesthetic character of most of Gatten’s films made over the ensuing 15 years, in particular the Byrd series and the Films for Invisible Ink.
Major Exhibitions, Screenings, and Critics Polls
Gatten's films premiere regularly at Lincoln Center in the New York Film Festival. His films have been included twice in the Whitney Biennial (2002 and 2006), as well as in the exhibition "The American Century: Art & Culture, 1900-2000" at the Whitney Museum of American Art. They are screened in large international film festivals (such as those in London, Toronto, Rotterdam, Berlin, Vienna, Santiago, Bangkok, Tokyo) and cinémathèques (Anthology Film Archives, NYC; Cinémathèque Française, Paris; Sala de Cine, Santiago; etc.) as well as exhibited in museums (including the National Gallery of Art, DC; SF MoMA; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Tate Modern, London; ICA-London; Austrian Film Museum, Vienna, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul), galleries (including Gladstone Gallery and Exit Art in NYC, Pierogi in Brooklyn, Paul Young Projects in LA, and SKE Gallery in Bangalore), university and art school spaces, and smaller venues connected to underground cinema, art, and poetry communities.
A 2010 Film Comment critics’ poll of artists cinema in the 21st c. placed Gatten within the top ten filmmakers, and included three of his films in a list of the fifty best individual works of the decade.
Texts of Light: A Mid-Career Retrospective of Fourteen Films by David Gatten, opened in November of 2011 at the Wexner Center for the Arts, touring, in 2012, to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge, MA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and ATA Gallery in San Francisco; and in Los Angeles at RedCat, The Egyptian Theater, the Los Angeles Film Forum, The Panorama, California Institute for the Arts, and the University of Southern California.
In May of 2012 an international critics poll conducted by Cinemascope named Gatten one of the "Fifty Best Filmmakers Under Fifty" alongside Academy Award nominated directors Wes Anderson, David Fincher, Steven Soderbergh, and Quentin Tarantino, as well as international "festival-circuit" filmmakers Jia Zhangke, Lucrecia Martel, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Carlos Reygadas, and American independent directors and film artists of Gatten's generation including Kelly Reichardt, Jennifer Reeves, Sharon Lockhart, and Paul Thomas Anderson.
In November of 2013 multi-program retrospectives of his films were presented by the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna and the National Film Archive in Prague.
In 2014 THE MATTER PROPOUNDED: The Films of David Gatten, 2010-2013 was featured at the Festival International de Cine de Gijon, in Gijon, Spain.
In March of 2015 the Irish Film Institute and the PLASTIK Festival of Artists Moving Image presented the international premiere of Gatten's The Extravagant Shadows as a part of their retrospective DAVID GATTEN IN THE 21ST CENTURY: 16mm Films & Digital Cinema, 2004-2014.
The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, South Korea mounted the most extensive retrospective of Gatten’s films to date in 2017. The text-heavy images were translated into Korean and spoken in that language by a series of South Korean actors, in the Japanese tradition of the “benshi” (“film-talker”).
Gatten’s most recent feature film premiered at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC) in 2021.
In November of 2024 a retrospective of 16mm and digital work was presented by La Région Central in Santiago, Chile.
Digital Cinema: The Extravagant Shadows
Gatten's first work of cinema "born digital," The Extravagant Shadows (2012) premiered in the penultimate edition of “Views from the Avant-Garde” at the New York Film Festival, Lincoln Center. Feature articles about, and reviews of, The Extravagant Shadows have appeared in Artforum, Film Comment, Reverse Shot, Cargo, Fandor, and IDIOM.
In 2021 The Extravagant Shadows was named the "Best Experimental Feature Film of the Decade 2011-2020" in the journal Senses of Cinema.
Collections
Gatten's work resides in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), British Film Institute, Whitney Museum of American Art, Austrian Film Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Cinémathèque Française, Scottish Poetry Library, and the Harvard Film Archive, as well as in a variety of public and private collections. Gatten's films are included on over two dozen film history syllabi at universities and colleges in the US, Canada, and Europe.
His original film elements, a complete set of 16mm reference prints, and DCPs of the digital works are held by The Academy Archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Science in Hollywood, CA.
Teaching
Starting in 1998 Gatten taught in the Filmmaking Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1999 he accepted a professorship at Ithaca College, where he was promoted to Associate Professor and granted tenure in 2004. From 2006-2009 Gatten was a visiting artist at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science & Art in New York City. In 2010 Gatten accepted a visiting professorship at Duke University where he taught until 2015. Gatten joined the faculty of the Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts as a tenured full professor in 2015. He officially retired from academic life in 2023 to spend more time in the studio on larger film projects. He will return to the classroom by special request in the Fall of 2025 to teach an updated version of his course David Lynch and the Cinema of Enchantment & Disturbance.