Editor: Keith Davis Writers: Alex Dippold, Jennifer Bates Lockley, Dave Maley Publisher: Office of Public Information Volume 22, No. 4  October 4, 1999

Professor’s Work Selected for NY Film Festival Screening Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, and Robert Altman have had films premiered at the New York Film Festival. In a week David Gatten, assistant professor of cinema and photography, will also be able to make that claim: his fifth film, Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises, makes its world premiere October 9 and 10 at the 37th New York Film Festival in Lincoln Center. It was one of 22 films selected from a worldwide pool of some 1,100 entries. Named after a 17th-century printing manual, Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises will be screened as part of the festival’s "Views from the Avant-Garde" program. It took Gatten two years to make his film, and the tricky thing is, he did it without a camera. "When I was in graduate school, I began developing an interest in what happened to pieces of film as they moved through the world," Gatten says. "Film records things photographically, as images, but things also happen to the film physically. For example, the emulsion gets scratched like old floors, like scars on bodies, and those scratches relate back to specific events. I once took strips of 16 millimeter film and immersed them in ocean water and found that the emulsion was able to record the motion of the waves. It was a way of using a technique that doesn’t invoke the standard apparatus of a camera to record something." What Gatten wanted to record when he made Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises was a transcendent moment in time. "Gutenberg inaugurating the use of movable type was a landmark moment," Gatten says. "It marked a turning point from scribal culture to mechanized reproduction. With the current movement away from chemical film processing to digitized computer images, we’ve now reached another turning point, and I thought that looking at what Gutenberg had done might give some answers to what we’re experiencing now." Gatten began making Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises by laying pieces of Scotch tape over the text of five different translations of the New Testament. He then pulled the tape strips off the paper and soaked them in water to dissolve the remaining bits of paper and let the ink leach into the glue. What was left was his "negative," which, when it was dry, he printed onto a roll of raw 16 millimeter film stock in a darkroom, using a flashlight to expose the film and cranking a spool to control the exposure time. He printed some 24,000 individual frames of text onto the film stock. When viewers watch the edited version of his silent 21-minute film, Gatten wants them to see words taking shape as images and sliding away to be replaced by yet another image. "This technique," Gatten says, "has been compared to abstract expressionist painting — like Jackson Pollock, say, dripping paint on a canvas. Small pockets of meaning emerge for an instant and then vanish into the flow of material, constituting a passage through time and space. The text-as-image is constantly in transformation, translation, and ascension as it pushes upward, disappearing at the ceiling of the frame." Beginning his first semester in the Roy H. Park School of Communications, Gatten is teaching courses in 16 millimeter film production, optical printing, and the history and practice of avant-garde film. He completed his undergraduate degree in filmmaking at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and received his M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998. His first film, hardwood process, won the grand prize at the 35th Ann Arbor Film Festival. It was also one of nine American films selected for a national tour of Japan. "I came to Ithaca College because there’s a full range of image making here, from television to photography to filmmaking," Gatten says. "I see this as a vibrant community to which I can add my interest in experimental film. I was also fortunate enough to receive a grant from the Park School’s Pendleton endowment to help me finish Moxon." Gatten’s works have been exhibited at film festivals in Ottawa, Toronto, the Netherlands, Bangkok, and Athens; they have also been screened at sites such as the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Chicago Filmmakers, and the Pacific Film Archive. He currently has five projects in the works, including what he calls a ghost story/historical romance revolving around the Byrd family of Virginia. He plans to tell it through the text from the catalogs used to auction off the library collection of William Byrd, the founder of Richmond and owner of what was one of the largest library collections of his time. In addition to Gatten’s work, this year’s New York Film Festival will be screening new productions by Pedro Almodóvar, Atom Egoyan, and Jane Campion, among others. The festival’s goal is stimulate critical debate by showing the year’s best films.

Created by Andrejs Ozolins. Updated 2 Nov 1999