Shrimp Boat Log


Rental Format(s): 16mm film

"If WHAT THE WATER SAID is a clever literalizing play off one of T.S. Eliot's sub-titles to 'The Wasteland,' SHRIMP BOAT LOG is intriguing for its signaling or blinking form, the intermittences of various footage including shrimp boats crossing the center of the screen and leaving wakes, and brief glances at a log book. Like a less spastic version of Brakhage's lapsing, blinking camera, Gatten's camera and editing technique in SHRIMP BOAT LOG give visual rhythm and form to coastal life-a native feeling for signals both perceptive and cultural, organic and technological. As in his nine-part SECRET HISTORY OF THE DIVIDING LINE, Gatten's Shrimp Boat Log is compelling in the way it gives particular shape to a viewer's reading experience - where often the viewer has mere seconds, if that, to read from a log, and so reads a few words at each viewing interval." - Thom Donovan, Wild Horses of Fire

SHRIMP BOAT LOG, the first reel of the ongoing Continuous Quantities series, contains 300 shots, 29 frames each, alternating between a notebook listing the names of shrimp boats that frequent the mouth of the Edisto River and images of these same boats. I started keeping track of these boats in 1994 when my family first starting visiting Seabrook Island, South Carolina every summer. I've returned to this spot many times since, making a series of underwater, cameraless films there (the WHAT THE WATER SAID series), always continuing to watch for the shrimp boats. I filmed these images during the summer and fall of 2006 and cut them over the next several years, using Leonardo da Vinci's Notebooks as a guide.

Of time and its divisions (916-918).

916.
Although time is included in the class of Continuous Quantities, being indivisible and immaterial, it does not come entirely under the head of Geometry, which represents its divisions by means of figures and bodies of infinite variety, such as are seen to be continuous in their visible and material properties. But only with its first principles does it agree, that is with the Point and the Line; the point may be compared to an instant of time, and the line may be likened to the length of a certain quantity of time, and just as a line begins and terminates in a point, so such a space of time begins and terminates in an instant. And whereas a line is infinitely divisible, the divisibility of a space of time is of the same nature; and as the divisions of the line may bear a certain proportion to each other, so may the divisions of time.

917.
Describe the nature of Time as distinguished from the Geometrical definitions.

918.
Divide an hour into 3000 equal parts.

[from The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Vol. 1]

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16mm film $125.00  

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