At about fifty minutes through the film, Gabriel appears again, walking through sparse woodland.
The final minutes of the film intercut Gabriel's walk with flower and water shots.
The film is silent, apart from seven moments at which excerpts from Bach's Goldberg Variations come in for two or three minutes at a time.
[3][4] The boy was played by Peter Mayne, who was from Cuba, New Mexico (where Martin lived at the time).
Martin referred to Mayne as ‘a little hippie boy’ and noted that though he looks about ten years old, he was in fact fourteen.
[5] Gabriel was filmed in various locations in the American Southwest, including California, Colorado and New Mexico.
The whole thing is about a little boy who has a day of freedom, in which he feels free.’[8] She also said that she made the film ‘in protest against commercial movies that are about destruction, deceit.
[11] More recently, the film has been screened in Edinburgh, UK (1999);[13] at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, UK (June 2010);[13] at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA (28 October 2011);[14] at DIM Cinema, Vancouver, Canada (16 April 2012);[15] at Anthology Film Archives, New York, USA (2013);[16] at Tate Modern, London, UK (5 June 2015);[17] at Experimental Film Club, Dublin, Republic of Ireland (28 July 2015);[18] and at Summerhall, Edinburgh, UK (20 January 2016);[19][20] at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA (21 October, 18 November, 16 December 2016);[21] at Art Cinema OFFoff, Ghent, Belgium (7 October 2019);[22] at the Roxie Theater, San Francisco, California, USA (18 February 2020).
[...] Agnes Martin's film is about water, about countryside, flowers, nature, and mystery.
[...] At the same time in the scientific world we were dealing with sensory deprivation experiments, where people were being put in chambers and their perceptual systems would begin to fire on their own.