Sunday, April 30, 2006 @ 1:00 PM
David Gatten: Secret History of the Diving Line parts I-IV
Presented by PDX Fest and Cinema Project
Over the last ten years David Gatten’s films have explored the intersection of the printed word and the moving image, while investigating the shifting vocabularies of experience and representation within intimate spaces and historical documents. Through traditional research methods and non-traditional film processes, the films trace the contours of both private lives and public histories, combining elements of philosophy, biography and poetry with experiments in cinematic forms and narrative structures. Currently Gatten is at work on a series of nine films about letters, lovers, books, ghosts and the Byrd family of Virginia during the early 18th century. This program will look at the first four of the series.
Secret History of the Diving Line
David Gatten
1996-2002, 20 minutes, silent, black & white 16mm film
“Conflicting descriptions of the same territory by the same William Byrd fracture in an attempt to inhabit the same space, yielding to obscure landscapes that vividly depict the numerical distances relegated to an appendix. As subtly rhythmic and droll as it is outwardly austere, David Gatten’s continued perusal of the Byrd library rewards patience with its faithful curiosity.”
The Great Art of Knowing
David Gatten
2004, 37 minutes, silent, black & white 16mm film
Love finds purchase between tightly shelved volumes. In the spaces between the letters. In the lines themselves. An antinomian cinema seems possible. A gentle iconoclasm? The image is always backwards in a mirror. The story unfolds slowly. The fourth film in the Byrd project.
MOXON’S MECHANICK EXERCISES, OR, THE DOCTRINE OF HANDY-WORKS APPLIED TO THE ART OF PRINTING
David Gatten
1999, 26 minutes, silent - 18 fps, black & white 16mm film
This handmade film, with its images generated almost entirely from cellophane tape, proceeds from the landmark moment in the middle of the fifteenth century when Gutenberg inaugurated the use of movable type in the West with his 42-line Bible. Using a cameraless tape and ink transfer process, words themselves were lifted from a number of historical texts, the ink-words were fixed directly onto a clear film base and some 24,000 individual frames of text were contact printed onto 16mm film stock.
THE ENJOYMENT OF READING (LOST & FOUND)
David Gatten
(2001, 16 minutes, silent - 18fps, color and black & white 16mm film