David Gatten is an experimental filmmaker and moving image artist. His work has appeared in film festivals, Whitney Biennials, and a number of solo and group exhibitions. A recent critics’ poll devoted to avant-garde practice placed him among the top ten filmmakers working today.
Language, the printed word and time have been the backbone to a large body of your work in moving image since 1995. What was it that sparked your interest in working with film, particularly 16mm?
I got interested in dealing with words on screen as moving image because I have a love of words on the printed page and how they look—the graphic materiality of language on the page. But I also love spoken language. Spoken language that has rhythm, that exists in time, and then that disappears. By putting words on screen, you can retain both the graphic materiality of the printed word, and the temporal, rhythmic sense of spoken language because it only lasts for a certain amount of time. My interest in 16mm film specifically came from an interest in the physicality of the material. I started working with moving images on computers in the 1980s, but I got really interested in the 1990s with working with the emulsion itself and performing experiments to transform the surface of the film strip in ways that didn’t actually involve the use of a camera, a lens, or sometimes even light, but actual physical markings on the film. I have a background in both theatre and dance, and so the physicality of 16mm film was very attractive, interesting and mysterious to me as someone who grew up with computers .Film, celluloid… it seemed kind of like magic.
During PLASTIK there will be a screening of your first digital film The Extravagant Shadow, which has only been shown a handful of times since it was completed in 2012. How have you found working with digital processes and materiality?
One of the things that happened in working digitally is my concern with surface material, and the reactions of one material against the other—that in the 16mm work, had been centred on the surface of the medium itself—in The Extravagant Shadows, that concern was transferred to something in front of the camera, and the materiality of the paint that I was using. I was painting different layers of acrylic and oil-based paint on top of each other, and chemical reactions were happening, and I was using the digital technology to document those changes. So that concern with materiality transferred from the surface of 16mm film to something in front of the digital camera. What I liked about working digitally, and what’s different from working in 16mm, is the level of control I was able to have with modulating layerings and links of dissolves. The Extravagant Shadows happens in three very long takes. It’s actually made up of many shots, with very, very long dissolves—dissolves of seven, eight, nine minutes, which could never actually be performed in celluloid. So the condition of the digital medium itself allowed me to make a different kind of image than I’d ever been able to make before on film.
On a related note, the soundtrack in many of your films is a direct result of the optical sound format of 16mm—from overexposed frames bleeding into the optical track in Invisible Ink to a sonic reading of the very markings made by the Atlantic Ocean in What the Water Said. I read in a recent interview that you have included music for the first time in The Extravagant Shadows—specifically sung language. Has this opened up an area that you would like to explore more, or was it very specific to this film?
It is something that I would like to explore more, and it’s something that I actually had been working with in a series of very private films which I showed only once to a particular group of people. I used to make class portraits of my students, and I would always include a piece of music with the class portraits. I started doing this in 1999. So I’ve actually been using music, but not in any of my publicly released work, until The Extravagant Shadows. The use of music, the use of ambient sound, which is something again that I had never done in 16mm, but have now explored in digital video, is something that I will continue to do. For a long time, my ideas about sound were very simple and were confined to letting the medium itself speak, and in 16mm of course, you don’t record sound generally directly onto the film itself. With the digital technology, there is an assumption almost, of sound. Digital cameras, as a default mode, record sound in sync with the image. I did want to explore that in The Extravagant Shadows and that’s something that I will continue to explore in two digital pieces that are now currently in progress.
Is the location or setting to where your films are screened and experienced important to you?
The location is critically important. I do not transfer my 16mm films to DVD or put them online, and I have not put The Extravagant Shadows online and I do not release it in a home video format. The context is important. I want these works to be experienced in a public setting, that is a formal one, and that is a social one. I want people to come to a theatre and there’s a social contract that takes place. When we sit in a room, the lights go down and we agree to be there in that space, negotiating the work together for a certain amount of time. That context, that idea that it is a public and social event, is very important to my work. The theatrical setting is very important. I make my work specifically for that context and I feel that it requires that context for it to have its full impact.
PLASTIK takes place in Dublin on Friday 20th, Saturday 21st and Sunday 22nd February with screenings taking place in IFI on Eustace Street, and Temple Bar Gallery and Studios on Temple Bar. The full schedule of screenings and talks (which also visits Galway and Cork respectively on the prior weekends) is available at www.plastikfestival.com
