It was one of 22 films selected from a worldwide pool of some 1,100 e ntries. It took Gatten two years to make his film, and the tricky thing is, he did it without a camera.
Film records things photographically, as images, but things also happen to the film physically.
For example, the emulsion gets scratched like old floors, like scars on bodies, and those scratches relate back to specific events. I once took strips of 16 millimeter film and immersed them in ocean water and found that the emulsion was able to record the motion of the waves. It was a way of using a technique that doesn't invoke the standard apparatus of a camera to record something. What Gatten wanted to record when he made Moxon's Mechanick Exercises was a transcendent moment in time. It marked a turning point from scribal culture to mechanized reproduction.