Critics reviews

The Extravagant Shadows is a masterwork – open, expansive, intellectually capacious. It is _big_, and not only because of its length. Like the Byrd series, The Extravagant Shadows is unafraid of delineating an all-encompassing perceptual space for its audience to enter, generating its own "time zone," as it were, wherein its internal connections demand a radical shift of perceptual expectation.

The result is something that's closer to the late novels of David Markson than anything in cinema; any satisfactory consideration of the relationships between language, time, and the digital image that Gatten uses as the very stuff of The Extravagant Shadows would require far more space than this couple hundred words, but just know that this is a rare example of cinema that might properly be considered as doing philosophy.

This distance between us and the books' repositories is made up for by Gatten, who, in a method common to his film-films, lays long excerpts, condensations, and re-writings of text upon the image itself, so that looking at the image is as much about seeing as it is reading—if these two activities can even be separated.