COLUMNS EXTRA CURRICULAR

Better Living Through Cinema

Holly Willis on David Gattens creative approach to film studies.

ts a Friday morning, and David Gatten is very tired, having taught both Wednesday and Thursday evenings. Like many lmmakers, in addition to making movies, Gatten also teaches. Indeed, the experimental lmmaker boasts the title Lecturing Fellow and Artist in Residence at Duke Universitys Arts of the Moving Image program, where he lectures during the spring semester, before returning to the old mining cabin in Colorados Four Mile Canyon where he lives with his wife lmmaker, writer and editor Erin Espelie for the rest of the year. His courses? AMI 101: Introduction to the Arts of the Moving Images: Better Living Through Cinema, which is based on the idea that lms can show us how to exist in the world, and AMI 370S: Matters of Life and Death, which explores the most intense experiences humans endure. Gatten, who is known for a body of lms dedicated to discerning the very essence of cinema, isnt simply showing movies and lecturing on the history and theory of cinema. Instead, hes bringing the rigor and attention to creating an indelible experience that characterize his own lmmaking to the structuring and presentation of his courses. For Gatten, teaching a course is a deeply creative act. Take his syllabi: each starts with a collage of quotations. For Better Living Through Cinema, theres a snippet from Rebecca Solnit on how to get lost, a poem by Norma Cole about false maps scrawled by sleep, a pithy statement about form and aesthetics from Fredrick Sommer and an eloquent analysis of spectacle by Guy Debord. The Matters of Life and Death syllabus features quotations from the writings of Maya Deren, John Cassavetes, Geoff Dyer and Henry James, among others. The words are more provocative than instructive; they ask you to enter the experience of the semester with curiosity and attention. I almost never introduce the lm by talking about the lm, says Gatten about each class session. I introduce the lm by reading philos14 FILMMAKER SPRING 2013

David Gatten with his students at Duke

ophy or playing a piece of music. The students dont know why Ive done that until 30 minutes into the lm, when they start to understand why they got this other information. I do think of these as compositions, Gatten continues, explaining his philosophy of both each class session and the structure of the courses across a semester. The courses are intellectually and artistically satisfying in the same way that making a movie is. Its like working in the long form of 14 weeks. Gatten explains that his students are not lm students there is no major in lm at Duke. Theyre not coming to get job skills, he says. Instead, students who enroll learn about ethics and aesthetics. In Better Living Through Cinema, well look at 27 different lms, from three-and-a-half minutes to four-and-a-half hours in length, all different kinds of work, from Hitchcock to Painlev. Last night we watched Window Water Baby Moving by Stan Brakhage and Claire Denis LIntrus (The Intruder), a 13-minute lm about birth from 1958 and a 130-minute, rst-person lm about a heart transplant. Thats the kind of combination I like to put together. For Matters of Life and Death, Gatten has

tried to view the entire semester as a structure in itself. He explains that the course focuses on instances in which lmmakers deal with extreme subject matter. They must resort to extreme formal gestures to really deal with the content, he explains, and I believe the lms accumulate in a certain way week to week. Gatten explains that the rst and 14th weeks of the semester speak to each other. Then the second and 13th weeks also speak to each other, and so on. The class sessions are like a series of nested parentheses, and they build to a core at the center of the course. He adds that for each session he writes a 14page essay, which he then memorizes and presents as a monologue. We meet for class from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m. Then we have a dinner from 10:00 to 2:00 a.m., when there is discussion. Gatten links his efforts in designing and presenting his courses to his own work, which consists of a collection of short lms that he began making in 1999, several of which are part of a nine-part lm cycle, Secret History of the Dividing Line, based on William Byrd II, his 1728 book The His see page 93

PHOTO BY YUMIAN DENG

the source of PODs most valuable growth. POD is currently in beta and needs the help of consumers to improve. For now, BMC is hedging their bets on a collaboration with Hollywood, hoping that the cinematic experiences that audiences love will be the gateway BMC needs to convince consumers to become a host for POD. Only time will tell if users of device-based mobile applications will be ready to take the leap to become hosts for biotech solutions that live inside them. But one thing is for sure: Hollywood has a never-ending supply of stories, much of which is sitting around on shelves collecting dust. To learn more about BMC and POD, Filmmaker recommends you visit the website, http://www.bodymindchange.ca.

EXTRA CURRICULAR
from page 14 tory of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina and his vast library. Gattens lms are about reading, writing, thinking and knowing, and they deal explicitly with the material of lm emulsion, light and dust, for example. In 2012, however, Gatten also made a three-hour digital work, The Extravagant Shadows, that invited the artist to explore a new form of writing and cinematic composition, as well as more extreme forms of duration. I dont think I could have made a threehour movie without having done these courses, Gatten says. Almost for the rst time in my life, the way Ive been thinking about structuring the classroom space into these four-hour blocks and the way I was thinking about structuring a long movie started to align. They started to feed each other. Having viewed much of Gattens body of work in Los Angeles last October as it traveled across the country as part of Texts of Light: A Mid-Career Retrospective of Fourteen Films, organized by Chris Stults of the Wexner Center for the Arts, and having had several conversations with him about lms and lmmaking, I cant help but envy a group of undergrads in Durham, N.C.,right now.

Visit Films Ryan Kampe agrees. I think there are people in the foreign community who are old school, like Italian or German or Russian buyers, in particular, who would say: Nope, cant buy it, says Kampe, who recently took on Sheldon Candiss LUV, which stars rapper Common, Dennis Haysbert and Danny Glover. But more and more, I think its lm dependent. Indeed, Adam Leons Bronx-set lowbudget Gimme the Loot, which stars two African-American unknowns, has sold to major distributors in France and the U.K. and smaller ones in Spain and Greece, according to Eric Schnedecker, head of sales and acquisitions at France-based sales company Urban Distribution International. He says the problem is less about race and more about U.S. indies in general, which suffer as a result of Hollywood hegemony abroad and European subsidies that support their own domestic lms. But veteran international sales executive David Glasser, CEO of The Weinstein Company, which acquired worldwide rights to Ryan Cooglers Fruitvale after its Sundance triumph, believes the times are changing, he says. We sold every territory on Fruitvale. Sure, we have obstacles to overcome, acknowledges Glasser. But I think a good movie domestically is a good movie internationally. But it helps if Forest Whitaker and an Oscar-winner such as Octavia Spencer are involved.

ters the screen while the conversation takes place on the other side of the screen. Its funny. Its horrible. Its disorienting. And yes, its angry. Even if its maker lives in a nice apartment.

FEST CIRCUIT
from page 21 some very high temperature bacteria, but nothing that can build rockets I want to die on Mars just not on impact. Speakers such as Musk were undeniably fascinating at SXSW this year, even as shifts in the tech landscape meant that many of the conferences topics life on Mars! seemed a bit distant from the lives of earlycareer developers for whom consumer app development is this generations version of starting a garage-rock band (or making an indie lm). Indeed, with venture capital owing to the less-sexy enterprise sector, and the next wave of transformative innovation (biotech and personalized medicine) a few years out, SXSW Interactive featured rock star speakers such as Pettis and Musk, as well as Al Gore who described his sale of Current TV to Al Jazeera as the most disruptive move on the chessboard and Megaupload Dark Lord Kim Dotcom. Alongside the usual seminars on coding and development, there seemed to be a higher number of somber panels examining digital lifestyles, such as Is Social Media Making Us Sick? I attended one such talk, The New Serendipity? based around one of SXSWs buzzwords this year. Panelists included John Perry Barlow (Electronic Frontier Foundation), Joichi Ito (MIT Media Lab) and Kevin Rose (Google Ventures), who all discussed how technology can enable the sort of unexpected encounters that can transform ones life. Their conversation essentially updated self-help homilies for the digital age. Said Barlow, They used to say fortune prefers the prepared mind, now its fortune prefers the networked mind. For Ito, keeping an open mind and surrounding yourself with interesting people was translated into, To develop a weak tie network, move toward outliers and look for patterns. As always, SXSW Interactive is hit-or-miss, depending on ones own schedule and the size of the crowds. I couldnt get into one hot seminar Googles demonstration of Google Glass although I did hear a lot about the companys unveiling of a talking shoe. But what about SXSW Film? Curation from the
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GAME ENGINE
from page 22 blocky face, while dialogue lines on the other half of the screen have you musing about the relationship between shaving and civilization. The split screens create a sense of disconnection a reection surely on the schizophrenic nature of being simultaneously an agent of violent death and a father/husband/ordinary guy who shaves in the morning. Pedericis aim, he said, was to articulate the American paradox of being bombarded with militaristic entertainment, while studiously ignoring the realities of our wars. For me, the most interesting part of the game is when youre playing rst-person shooters with your son while discussing his ADHD, what kinds of weapons you have at work and who is worse: commies, Nazis or terrorists. Again, the screen is split the action is you playing the rst-person shooter, aiming for peoples heads as blood splat-

INDUSTRY BEAT
from page 16 Some countries are racist, I guess, but thats not a big factor compared to other issues, continues Mickie, who notes that a lm like Clment Virgos Poor Boys Game, which stars Danny Glover, was not critically acclaimed, but sold well because Glover is a name.