david gatten

A couple days ago I was hanging out with my friend David Gatten in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. David is a filmmaker who moved to Red Hook back in February when he found a studio space in an old, converted luggage factory. Before that he had been living in Ithaca, NY where he taught at Ithaca College.
David’s films remind me of an obsessive butterfly collection or exquisite hope chest: they serve as poetic documents that detail forgotten places and ideas, reworking them into a precise visual experience. He is very interested in the printed word, and watching his films involve reading lots of on-screen-text. There is a very historical quality to his films, but in a very personal, humble sort of way. When it comes to filmmaking, David is totally hard-core. He works entirely in film, using antiquated technologies and discontinued film stocks. His films are usually silent, or “without sound” as he likes to put it, and often take him several years or more to complete. He has turned his bathroom into a darkroom and has built his own optical printer. David doesn’t transfer his films to video, not necessarily because he has anything against video, but because the detail in his films is so fine that they are simply lost in the transfer, and he’d rather just patiently let his films be seen on film instead of rushing to distribute them on video to mass audiences. He has also been rather successful with his work. He has twice been exhibited in the Whitney Biennial (and is included in their permanent collection) and recently received a Guggenheim Fellowship. His films have screened in art museums and film festivals around the world, and he even came in second place at the 2006 Peripheral Produce Invitational!

David and I have been friends for a while, and he knows I have a fondness for tugboats, industrial areas, and abandoned factories, so he already had a walking tour planned for my arrival. We packed up the Bolex and a couple cans of film and hit the streets. We found abandoned sugar refineries, mysterious window displays, tugboats triumphantly skirting past the Statue of Liberty, warehouses dating back to the Civil War, and Key Lime Pies. Red Hook is in the southwestern tip of Brooklyn, directly below Manhattan and just east of Staten Island. Long time residents like to point out that Red Hook is the only part of the country that gets to see the Statue of Liberties face, while the rest of the country only gets her ass. We explored the abandoned sugar refinery and then shot some film of the mysterious window display, before finally purchasing a 10″ Key Lime Pie for us to eat later.



It was interesting walking around Red Hook. It’s an old industrial area and working class neighborhood that is just on the cusp of re-development and gentrification. It’s not entirely there yet, but you can sense it coming. The empty warehouses, the abandoned factories, and the row houses lived in by low-income families all sit perched like an old growth forest that is slowly being surrounded by lumberjacks. It is just a matter of time before everything changes.
In the fall of 2004, David brought me to Ithaca College to lecture and show my films. I was immediately taken with how informed and engaged his students were; it was clear that he was assembling a small army of bright young experimental filmmakers. I have visited at least 50 schools and universities as a guest lecturer over the past few years, and I must say that I have never been to a campus where the students where more interested and enthusiastic about experimental film. It was clear that David was an amazing teacher, not only teaching the art of film, but instilling a true wonder and sense of community to his students. The visit made me want to be a student again. One of my proudest moments as a filmmaker was at the 2005 Ann Arbor Film Festival, where several of David’s students showed up wearing shirts that featured stills from my films. It took me a while to figure out what was going on, and then suddenly realized they had made their own Matt McCormick T-Shirts.

After walking around and exploring Red Hook, we headed back to David’s place eager to get into the pie. If David was an animal he thinks he’d probably be a Bipes Biporus, but lately he said he has been feeling more like a Numbat. His father is a retired biologist and his mother serves on the City Council of Greensboro South Carolina. David was diagnosed with cancer just over a year ago, but he totally beat it with the aid of a juicer and a few really good friends. He is currently working on several projects, including the nearly completed first part of a new series entitled “Films For Invisible Ink” which promises lots of white space, a few words, and a few rectangular shapes coming in and out of focus. He is also working on a project based on Leonardo Da Vinci’s (or was it Decaprio’s?) theory that an hour could be divided into 3000 equal measures. In the film, David is dividing one hour of film into 3000 separate shots, each lasting exactly 29 frames (about 1.2 seconds). The 3000 images and sounds will be culled from footage he has been shooting since 1994 and arranged in sections dating to particular times and places of his past. We wondered if we could divide the Key Lime Pie into 3000 equal parts, but then decided it would be better to just eat it.

We were able to eat about two thirds of the pie, but just didn’t have the strength to take it all the way. We struggled with some mathematical formulas, trying to figure out if we could have eaten an entire 8″ pie (the one we purchased was 10″) but quickly realized that the math was far too difficult. The sugar in the pie made it a little hard to sleep that night, but it was well worth it.