{"id":18294,"date":"2025-12-27T22:00:40","date_gmt":"2025-12-28T03:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=18294"},"modified":"2025-12-25T20:56:40","modified_gmt":"2025-12-26T01:56:40","slug":"the-extravagant-shadows-2012-david-gatten","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/18294","title":{"rendered":"The Extravagant Shadows (2012, David Gatten)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Opens with music, then literature, then watching paint dry, and stories… or we’ll call them texts<\/em>, to be safe.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

We get into our routine of new color, new text, then of course he starts changing the patterns. After the first hour, instead of text appearing over the colors then going away, the text starts changing, crossfading into new texts. Twenty minutes later there is sync sound for the first time. There have been slight light shifts before, but around the same time as the sound, the current paint color becomes unstable – it turns out this was filmed outside in Colorado, and he hoped that clouds would add some chance into the mix. Soon the idea that this might be a single time-lapsed shot (or real-time, turns out it’s quick-drying paint) goes out the window, as the scene cross-fades into different colors and textures.<\/p>\n

Mouseover to make years pass by:
\n\"image\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Halfway through, the title Anonymous Life Among the Definite Articles<\/em> begins a more storylike story than usual, about a woman with a memory of a man and a bookstore. As soon as this story is reaching some kind of climax, he paints a color, then a new color before the first one has fully dried, the brush moving in splotches instead of nice even lines, making a blue\/tan mess, over which plays our third hourly classic pop song. He runs some text about seeming and seemings, which I didn’t follow at all. Now all the rules are changing – he does multiple coats of the same color, plays multiple pop songs in a row. I lost my mind when he painted a diagonal line instead of a straight vertical, causing K to laugh at me. She says the movie is a palimpsest<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Essential interview at Idiom<\/a>, where I learned the songs are “from a 1968 Merrilee Rush album called Angel of the Morning”…<\/p>\n

Aaron Cutler:<\/p>\n

Though many [texts] originally come from other writers, including Stefan Zweig, Maurice Blanchot, and Henry James (from whose short story \u201cThe Jolly Corner\u201d Gatten took Shadows\u2019 title), the tale that they obliquely tell \u2014 made up of overlapping possible stories that lovers might share, if chance allows \u2014 is of Gatten\u2019s invention.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gatten:<\/p>\n

My background of consuming and enjoying [commercial cinema] probably helped me conceive work that was different, and closer to the aesthetic experience of the fine arts. I admire the idea of the oppositional cinema, but what I\u2019m making is just in favor of itself, and not necessarily opposed to something else \u2014 I like the other thing too, it just isn\u2019t what I\u2019m doing … For the kind of experience I seek, I don\u2019t want anyone to forget who they are or where they are, and I want my viewers to be active in a different way. I want the chief activity to be that of the viewer approaching the screen, and for the meaning of the work not to be inherent, but rather to be a product of someone\u2019s engagement with it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

Daniel Kasman<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Since the paint is quick-drying, we also witness the change in texture of the painted surface itself, along with the evolution of the light conditions, so cracks, welts, smashed gnats, ripples and other distortions become apparent second by second. These changes \u2014 in light\/color, texture \u2014 are often happening at the same time Gatten is fading in, or out, long excerpts of text, and the result is that as your eye scans the text to read it, \u201cbehind\u201d the text the \u201cbackground\u201d seems to be changing with your reading. It is almost as if you, the viewer, are changing the image through the act of reading, which dovetails into the text’s mysterious evocation of almost\/not-quite\/happenstance\/erstwhile relationships: the act of reading, of seeing, is so quicksilver that it changes the nature of the subject being seen, read, and the reading’s subject, the love, the memory.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

Holly Willis in Film Comment<\/a> quotes Gatten on the earlier Byrd films, then on Shadows:<\/p>\n

“There will be a lot of words in these films,” he explained, speaking with characteristic precision. “You won\u2019t be able to read all of these words. I expect that this will provoke anxiety. That is as it should be.” This anxiety, Gatten explained later in an interview, is significant: “The enjoyment of reading and the anxiety of not being able to read are the two sides of the coin: you can\u2019t have one without the other.”
\n…
\n“I have moved in a few of the recent works to language that is not difficult because it is not available physically; it is that it\u2019s more abstract. The questions become, \u2018How does one get from one piece of legible language to the other piece of legible language?\u2019 and \u2018How does meaning accrue between those legible things?\u2019 It\u2019s less now about physical, visible legibility and more, I think, conceptual legibility or illegibility.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Michael Sicinski<\/a> has an overview of Gatten’s work leading up to this movie:<\/p>\n

Taken as a whole, Gatten\u2019s work over the past eighteen years has been an ongoing inquiry into cinematic knowledge, its connection to, and its role as a part of, the broader history of human knowledge … This strange new work is undoubtedly a continuation down the formal and phenomenological pathways forged by the Byrd films…<\/p>\n

Gatten\u2019s texts (which seem to be an amalgam of original and appropriated material) give the distinct impression that an actual story is developing. That is, The Extravagant Shadows<\/em> is not just a feature, but it is almost a narrative. And what is it about? These textual fragments are preoccupied with two key elements: emotional connection and various methods of communicative transmission. Two figures are trying to make contact with one another … We read of the mails, the telegraph, the selection of books, the distance between nations. Eventually, the speaker (or speakers) seem to doubt the efficacy of writing altogether.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Opens with music, then literature, then watching paint dry, and stories… or we’ll call them texts, to be safe. We get into our routine of new color, new text, then of course he starts changing the patterns. After the first hour, instead of text appearing over the colors then going away, the text starts changing, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1049,74,2072,302],"class_list":["post-18294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-2010s","tag-avant-garde","tag-david-gatten","tag-painting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18294","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18294"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18294\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18303,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18294\/revisions\/18303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}