How to Conduct a Love Affair

A history of scarred surfaces, an inquiry, and an imagining: for the marks we see and the marks we make, for the languages we can read and for those we are trying to learn. Reproduced by hand on an old contact printer resulting in individual, unique release prints.

Cut-glass gleaming, shards of vision interrupted, reformulated, and freshly shaped into a response to the power of words and their ability to both describe and create sensations of outer worlds and inner realities. A movie made on the occasion of the publication of the volume of poetry ANARCH. by Frances Richard, published by Futurepoem.

The result of a series of camera-less collaborations between the filmmaker, the Atlantic Ocean, and a crab trap. For three days in January and three days in October of 1997, and again, for a day, in August of 1998, lengths of unexposed, undeveloped film were soaked in a crab cage on a South Carolina beach. Both the sound and image are the result of the ensuing oceanic inscriptions written directly into the emulsion of the film as it was buffeted by the salt water, sand, rocks and shells.

"Excerpts from Sir Thomas Browne's 1658 text Hydriotaphia Urne-Buriall Or, A Brief Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk are superimposed with the stone faces of grave markers and burial urns. This image-text bookends a series of objects framed in the ancient glass window panes of a tiny shop, in a tiny snow covered town, on a mountain top in Colorado. A pocket watch, a postal scale, a small mirror. A stop watch, some stamps, a knife, some bandages, an hour glass. Time is short. Time is running out. The time left is all the time we have."--Gatten

Suggestion is the rock, and the physical evidence is the evanescent spray that breaks against the unseen. Transitive enharmonics of things touching in middair, an air which is Time—not an actual intersection, but with a consequence as powerful as predestination, a momentary fulfillment, a trail beyond mere pattern, like a streak of truth alive and uncontained, like something that runs through infinity slowing to leave condensation, sonority, a temperature. Lines crossing lines. Not there. There. Invisibilities smudging. Gesture and impression, optic suggestions, agents on and in the mind. Each with vibrations, dollops, whispers, throbs, particles and waves. A finger of pigment brushing a lip of language exchanging carriage supports, liquidities, fire. Moire of meanings. Micro settings in the heart. The time it takes. The very least one can say is to say The Extravagant Shadows is a major work. Humanly essential, adventurous and necessary.

Paired texts as dueling histories; a journey imagined and remembered; 57 mileage markers produce an equal number of prospects. The latest in a series of films about the division of landscapes, objects, people, ideas and the Byrd family of Virginia during the early 18th century. —David Gatten

Four short interludes on filmmaking, chemistry, the American West and interplanetary communications.

A portrait of one of Gatten's mentors, the filmmaker Zack Stiglicz, filming on the shore of Lake Michigan.

Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Concentrate your attention. What Question will you ask? The Matter Propounded... makes use of an early 20th-century “Tablet of Jupiter” system for attempting to tell one’s future. The film invites viewers to make their own suppositions about the relationship of the questions we ask of the world and the answers we find for ourselves. A "letter-press" 16mm film.

In my hand I hold a leaf from the tree outside my window. Old hand lined now age and experience veins grown larger. Central vein on the leaf stems my palm. Outside under the tree on the playground the shrieks of children poke sounds of traffic near and far. Rumble is the distance away of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Sun is the fenders bending the sound of the city so many sounds at once un-focusing my eyes. Traffic is snarled. I am thirsty. I shut my window thick and everything goes but the light the light pounds away a second at a time, relentless. Everything is connected is a close place is passing is a light through a tree against night and sky. Make a wish a sign a cross across a great distance. That’s the sun that’s the road I take that takes me south in sun back to her.

A limited-run performance of songs written by David Lynch and Chrystabell, with Chrystabell performing the material to tracks of David’s instrumentation, enveloped in the stunning organic images created specifically for The Spirit Lamp by internationally renowned experimental filmmaker David Gatten. The performance begins with three minutes of David Lynch’s voice, introducing Chrystabell in the form of a love story.

Film for Invisible Ink, case no. 323: ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (2010), was composed as an epithalamium, or matrimonial poem, for Erin Espelie. Bringing together Western Union Telegraphic Code and Francis Bacon’s list of twenty-seven privileged instances from The New Organon (1620), along with passages from the Book of Common Prayer, the film is as stenographic as it is steganographic, a shorthand for the immense and indescribable “instances” that shape a life.

"This chapter of my ongoing exploration of the Byrd library finds its name and shape within a single volume from that collection: Athanasius Kircher's 17th century encyclopedia, THE GREAT ART OF KNOWING. Herein find tangled texts and crossed destinies, filled with figures at once buried deep and tossed high by History, lined with traces of a hidden romance. 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 from the Byrd project." - David Gatten

The last time I had dinner with Peter we spoke of sunsets – both sunsets we had experienced and sunsets we had filmed – and, of course, of boats; shrimp boats in particular. We made a plan to share with each other all the rolls of all the sunsets we'd never put into our films. That was November of 2015. By June of 2016, Peter was gone. We never had the chance to exchange our sunsets, but in the 72 hours after his passing, I composed this film, made of up some of the elements about which he cared so much: sea and sky, water and light, boats making for the horizon. In memory and in celebration. - David Gatten

“A companion of sorts to WHAT THE WATER SAID. An attempt to assess the potentials, possibilities and pitfalls of finding meaning in – or assigning human meaning to – the natural world; by way of Wallace Stevens. ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ and ‘Of Mere Being’ translated into Ogham (the 5th-century ‘tree alphabet’ derived from a notational system used by shepherds to record notes on their wooden staffs), and carved a letter at a time into a piece of semi-transparent flexible wood (black leader).” (DG)

This timeless experimental film draws on the work of 17th century scientist Robert Boyle to present a varied combination of texts, objects, colours and textures. The traditional tone of the cinematic impressions takes us back into the past (evocations of Boyle’s era, projection using damaged film stock) and the images have something of a cathartic quality about them. The title of this dream-like, mood- -inducing film, a tribute of sorts to the Irish thinker, was inspired by a Jorie Graham poem and underlines the nature of the 14-year process during which the film came together.