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.
"... David Gatten, in his film HARDWOOD PROCESS, proposes that the scarred surfaces of our physical world are actually the visual dimension of secret languages and exotic vocabulary. HARDWOOD PROCESS traffics in chemically manipulated and optically reprinted images of this world. Marks on scruffy floor boards, swirls of dust and fallen hairs, weather bruised walls of an old barn, words etched into film, vividly colored and solarized windows, fields aglow with otherworldly light, lover's hands feeling lover's hands, painterly abstraction that borders on blind light, the darkly voided screen itself - Gatten mindfully, imaginatively, poetically, generously regards these marked realms not as chaos, not as visual noise, but as enigmatic languages." - Zack Stiglicz
Awards: Grand Prize, 35th Ann Arbor Film Festival; Grand Prize, Onion City Film Festival, 1997; Juror's Citation, 16th Black Maria Film and Video Festival.
Exhibition (selected): Pacific Film Archive; Chicago Filmmakers; Impakt Film Festival; Millennium, NY; Anthology Film Archives and others.
1996, 16mm, color/si, 14m, $45
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.
"Bypassing half of the usual mechanical needs of filmmaking, Gatten instead uses nature as his recording device. The film is, indeed, about process, but also about nature as both subject and author ... the process yields a stunning range of results: at times quiet and lyrical, at others the scratching is so dense that it leaves a nearly white screen and a loud roar, evoking the waves crashing on shore. ... The overall feel is amazingly organic and seems to defy the random action of the ocean's weathering - it seems structured, following a predetermined pattern: one almost senses an underwater intelligence in its formation." - Patrick Friel, Chicago Filmmakers
Award: Director's Citation, 18th Black Maria Film and Video Festival
Exhibition (selected): Pacific Film Archive; Chicago Filmmakers; Art Gallery of Ontario; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Impakt Film Festival; Millennium Film Workshop, NY; Images Festival; Athens Int'l Film Festival; THAW99; Art Institute of Chicago; The Moving Word Film & Poetry Exchange.
1997-1998, 16mm, b&w/so, 16m, $50