AS A GRADUATE STUDENT at
the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996, David Gatten, having been Inspired by the work of Agnes Martin, experimented with
drawing lines on film when serendipity led him to a little-known volume called The Secret History of the Line. An
eighteenth-century text written by William Byrd II, a wealthy planter and
government official in Virginia, this book (together with its companion, The History of the Dividing Line) is an
account of the author’s Journeys mapping the border between Virginia, the first
English colony In North America, and the newer colony of North Carolina. Byrd’s
life and writings became all the more Interesting to the filmmaker when he
learned that Byrd possessed one of the largest libraries In
the colonies at the tame, a collection of almost four thou- sand books. And so
Gatten embarked on a cycle of nine films considering the relationships among
language, image, experience, and representation, one of the most erudite and
ambitious undertakings In recent cinema.
If drawing was the genesis
of Gatten’s Secret History of the
Dividing Line, A True Account in Nine Parts (1996-),
bibliophilia has been the passion sustaining it. Books from the Byrd library
and other literary sources—including William’s diary as well as his daughter
Evelyn’s correspondence with a forbidden lover—are Integrated
into the four Secret History films
the thirty-five-year-old artist has completed so far. These works have been
shown at numerous venues, including the Pacific Film Archive at Berkeley and the
New York Film Festival. The latest Installment, The Great Art of Knowing (2004), will be screened in
In keeping with its
bibliographer-cartographer subject, the cycle originated in literature and
drawing, and these fiends, particularly the latter’s relationship to handmade
film, are the Intertwined structural devices running through the works. Using
rapidly scrolling text pages, hieroglyphics, and magnified script, Gatten
traces the moment when words and letters become illegible as text and visible
as Image. In this regard, his film- making owes much to the poetry of Susan
Howe and e. e. cummings, as well as Eastern character-based compositions, all
of which hinge not only on the meaning of words but also their arrangement on
the page. Gatten mentioned In a talk last year at the
New York Film
Festival
that viewers often ask why he makes films and not books—a question perhaps well
taken, but oblivious to his austerely beautiful cinematography and masterful
command of nontraditional cinematic technique.
Indeed, Gatten’s
palimpsestic films showcase an array of cinematic processes that constitute a
parallel (if idiosyncratic and incomplete) survey of the medium’s history,
tracing some of its technical developments and placing them within a larger
movement from text to Image. Secret
History of the Dividing Line (1996-2002), which serves as a kind of preamble to the
cycle, Includes a section that focuses on the handmade splices forging pieces
of film together. The lanes disappear and turn into cragged white shapes on
black that resemble a topographical map, evoking the wilderness charted In Byrd’s
books. Bird’s-eye view and magnification thus come to define two oscillating
poles of Gatten’s inquiry. To make Moxon’s
Mechanick Exercises, or, The Doctrine
of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing (1999), the third
installment, which was finished first, Gatten used a time-consuming process
that Involves affixing cellophane tape to book pages, removing the pulp by
immersing the pages in hot water, and transferring the remaining ink directly
to the filmstrip by hand. The title was taken from one of the volumes in Byrd’s
library, and the film revolves around the invention of Gutenberg’s printing
press, an element significant to the cycle in that it marked the moment when
text became detached from the act of writing by hand. Whereas the first film
consists entirely of text, Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises contains a few brief
shots of book pages, and The Great Art of
Knowing expands on the use of photographic imagery with shots of feathers,
dried branches, and book spines. The
Enjoyment of
Gatten’s ingenious charting
of cinematic technique parallels his uncovering of the Byrd family history. Over
the course of the cycle Evelyn, William’s heartbroken daughter, becomes more
prominent, and her forbidden and ultimately tragic romance will continue to
thread through the remaining five films. Her suffering
straits sharply with William’s secret diary, an unemotional record, written in
a coded script, of gentlemanly activities. One of the brief color images
appearing near the end of The Enjoyment
of Reading is the tip of a flickering candle filmed in extreme close-up—a
classic symbol of waiting for a lost lover. Gatten’s resurrection of Byrd’s
library is a subtle rehearsal of cinema’s history, a history that has long been
married to the idea of the unread. From spirit photography to home movies, the
photographic record has always served as a means of rescuing the likenesses of
loved ones from oblivion. Gatten takes a reader’s pleasure in unearthing the
near-forgotten archive and its buried meanings, while evincing a keen
understanding of the limitations of the text. The second film in the cycle, The Great Art of Knowing, contains a
quotation from Susan Howe that may sum up Gatten’s underlying proposition for animating Byrd’s
library: “All words run along the margins of their secrets.”
HENRIETTE HULDISCH IS AN ASSISTANT CURATOR AT THE