NEW YORK, N.Y. — This past Saturday, two members of Duke’s film faculty showed their impressive work at the renowned New York Film Festival.
The festival selected films by Spring 2010 Visiting Filmmaker David Gatten and Production Teaching Fellow Shambhavi Kaul for the 13th Annual Views from the Avant-Garde series. Gatten’s Journal and Remarks and Kaul’s Scene 32 screened in front of a packed audience in the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center this past Saturday.
The experimental series, which took place over the course of this past weekend, featured 60 works divided into 11 different programs. Since it was added into the festival in 1997, the collection has become a premiere stage for avant-garde cinema, for which there is no real commercial market.
Program 2, the second of the 11-part series which showcased Gatten and Kaul’s films, featured ten non-narrative works from different filmmakers. The topics and their geographic locations ranged from Halloween in a small, South American town to a letter composed in Thailand to a Canterbury Tales-inspired journey through snowy Great Britain.
“The Views from the Avant-Garde section of the festival is not only international but also includes films that, because of their atypical nature, are otherwise impossible to see,” Kaul wrote in an e-mail.
Keeping with the international tone, Kaul’s three-minute Scene 32 takes place in the salt fields of India’s Kaatch desert, where Kaul was born on her filmmaker father’s film set.
“I have this kind of mythic relationship to the place,” she said after her film screened. “I’ve always wanted to go back and see it over again...to create a new relationship with the place that expressed the longing, the sense of memory...that’s part of the fiction of it.”
Rather than turn to personal history for inspiration, Gatten was influenced by the famous evolutionary work of Charles Darwin. Journals and Remarks transports the audience to the birthplace of his theory: the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador.
“I was trying to compare Darwin’s words with my experience 180 years later and see what that would yield,” Gatten said about his work. “I’m really interested in different ways of representing the world, and the relationship between the representation of the world through words and the representation of the world through images.”
Gatten’s film is part of a larger work called Continuous Quantities, the structure of which is based on an entry in one of Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks. “One of the things [Da Vinci] said was ‘I would like to devise a machine that could divide the hour into 3000 equal parts’,” Gatten said. “And I thought, I will make a 60 minute film with 3,000 shots all the same length. That works out to be 1.2 seconds, and in film terms, 29 frames.” The 15-minute Journal and Remarks represents 700 of those 3,000 shots.
This is the sixth time Gatten’s work has appeared in the festival, whereas Kaul was one of 20 filmmakers showing work for the first time. Despite differing levels of experience, the filmmakers can relate to each other through their passion and creative vision.
“The commuity of filmmakers who gather for this festival make films for no other reason than a deep desire to do so,” Kaul said. “This makes for an environment of dedicated, incredibly creative, intellectual as well as supportive filmmakers.”
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