Paul Sharits

Long after his premature death, the impact of Paul Sharits lingers on. The prominent iconoclast and innovator provoked with fast-flickering, pulsating, colourful mosaics. The many interviews and testimonies are also a portrait of a generation of leading voices in experimental filmmaking.

Feature-length compilation program presenting 37 out of 41 original fluxfilms produced and directed in the 1960s by Fluxus artists, including George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Robert Watts, Paul Sharits, et al.

A recording of a meeting in the studio where Jeffrey Schier and Woody show colleagues and teachers a new tool. Between 1976 and 1980, Woody and Schier designed a prototype device, the Vasulka Imaging System, or Digital Image Articulator. It was one of the first digital audiovisual tools to generate image algorithms and convert them to an analog signal. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo became one of these places of, teaching and mediating, in the area of Media Art, developing into what was perhaps to the most influential school for media in the twentieth century. Teaching there under the leadership of the founder Gerald O’Grady were the (meanwhile canonized) structuralist, avantgarde filmmakers Hollis Frampton, Tony Conrad, and Paul Sharits, documentary filmmaker James Blue, video artists Steina and Woody Vasulka, and Peter Weibel.

Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades.

'Rapture' is a fierce vision of a Dionysian experience, a tightly controlled visual statement about the abandonment of self to heightened transportive states. It is also an exploration of the similarity between 'religious' and 'visionary' ecstasy and psychotic states.

'Rapture' is a fierce vision of a Dionysian experience, a tightly controlled visual statement about the abandonment of self to heightened transportive states. It is also an exploration of the similarity between 'religious' and 'visionary' ecstasy and psychotic states.

'Rapture' is a fierce vision of a Dionysian experience, a tightly controlled visual statement about the abandonment of self to heightened transportive states. It is also an exploration of the similarity between 'religious' and 'visionary' ecstasy and psychotic states.

A chronicle of Sharits' 1977 visit to Romania to experience three of Brancusi's most famous sculptures.

Three-screen film. On the first screen, close-ups of an agitated match in front of a young woman's fearful face. On the soundtrack: matches, warnings of a rattlesnake, the phrase: "Listen, I will not speak." The ribbon runs at variable speeds, sometimes blurring, sometimes slowing down, to stop, on which the image / celluloid begins to fry and to burn, then leaves, runs, stops again, leaves again ... On the second screen we see the first rephotographed; here the "burns" are both fixed or new (a burn in the second degree). On the third screen, we see the second screen rephotographed. The subject of the film is the fragility of the film, as medium, as well as the vulnerability of man. Both the film and the figure resist threats / intimidation / mutilations.

Two reels of mis-takes in shooting Part II of 3RD DEGREE. Film was loaded in camera improperly and the image slides about off-center and becomes blurred – creating some rather amusing and mysterious imagery. A made “found” object. —ubu.com

Reel 13 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.

2 screen projection

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

The visual "degeneration" of the image ... through successive rephotography is paralleled by the compression of verbal information to the point of its loss of legibility; yet, both the "degenerated" sound and image are perceptually engaging, even in the most advanced stages of "degeneration". It is obvious why the film has its title, because of the strategies of its coming into being, but, paradoxically, at the level of effect, its dynamics arise from its "Episodic Degeneration".

The film consists of two identical prints shown simultaneously, one projected inside the image of the other. The inner image is out of sync one second in advance of the larger image creating a dynamic inter-play between the overlapping frames.

The film consists of two identical prints shown simultaneously, one projected inside the image of the other. The inner image is out of sync one second in advance of the larger image creating a dynamic inter-play between the overlapping frames.

This is a rare video interview with one of America’s finest film artists, shot in New York towards the end of his abruptly terminated career.

Film by Paul Sharits presented as double projection theatrically and quadruple projection in galleries.

Like ANALYTICAL STUDIES I, these short works each develop a different rhythmic and/or melodic idea using only rapid successions of color frames. The "Specimens" are called such because they are the "subjects" of (rephotography) analysis: "Specimen II" was intended to be the subject for the film EPISODIC GENERATION - although the footage, in itself, was successful, I did not find it adequate for its intended purpose; therefore, "Specimen IV" was created and was used (rephotographed) for EPISODIC GENERATION. The other works were studies for sections of the film DECLARATIVE MODE. (After titles, focus should be shifted to sharpen the edges of the screen.)

A set of short pure color studies, usually exploring one dominant hue. Most of these works were studies for longer projects. The last four "migraine" studies are rhythmically based around the five-cycle-per-second oscillation pulse of the typical fortification illusions preceding a migraine attack; this onset period, with its visually dynamic effects, is reported to be a quite vibrant and enjoyable state.

A flicker film of colorful squares.

The films are of two patients, extracted from a medical film study of brain wave activity during seizures.

A series of tail ends of varied strips of film, with sometimes recognizable images dissolving into light flares, appear to run through and off of a projector. A romantic "narrative," suggesting an "ending," is inferred.

The images for this project were first obtained by enlarging, with an optical printer, frames of evenly distributed grain particles from a black and white strip of underexposed 8mm Tri-X film. The resulting 16mm black and white Plus-X copy was again blown up with an optical printer to make a negative on high contrast stock.

Particles throb in three dimensions.

Two projectors pulse in tandem

The film consists of seven sections: the first section, "Specimen I," a "flicker" film, is the subject for the other sections of ANALYTICAL STUDIES III. ... "Specimen I," as with most of my other works, also exists as a "Frozen Film Frame," wherein the entire footage of the film is cut into strips and aligned serially between sheets of clear plexiglas.

Paul Sharits short work

Footage of a strip of damaged film.

Sharits produced Color Sound Frames by rephotographing strips of his previous films. He moved the strips, singly and in pairs, across a light table in front of the camera at various speeds. Sprocket holes of the original strips are visible at the edges of the frame, and the soundtrack of this film replicates the rat-a-tat of silent film sprocket holes played with the sound on. - CMOA

"There is a paradox in such artistically special (and significant) films as Sharits' very real and reflexively beautiful AXIOMATIC GRANULARITY. It is that in becoming so accessible and authentic through its refusal to be anything but itself - emulsion grain seen in color and movement - the film for most viewers is likely to be impenetrable ... the film begins to evoke a quiet flow of thought. That thought, however, is repeatedly returned to the light perceived on the screen as the film calls attention to itself through the random appearances of scratches, becoming simply and pleasantly what it is, refreshingly nothing more." - Anthony Bannon, Buffalo Evening News

A highly varied and playful series of short sketches involving induced camera "mistakes," printing "errors" and various "assaults" upon film (some rephotographed) which in one way or another reveal the process/materiality of cinema. The "unframing" called for in this film (bringing the top frame line down into the viewing area as is possible by adjusting the projector framer) is a way of heightening the intended unmasking of the usually hidden vulnerability/fragility of the film strip.

A mapping of an image of the linear passage of '16mm film frames' and 'emulsion scratches' onto actual 16mm film strip (the unperceived film 'print')/the aural word 'miscellaneous' is extended to a length of 8 minutes by serial fragmentation, looping, staggering and overlaying/a variational but non-developmental strand thru time.

Streaming, scratched lines continuously appear two at a time over images of flowing water.

T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G uses flickering frames of solid color juxtaposed with positive and negative still images of a man—sometimes cutting off his own tongue with glitter-covered scissors, sometimes suffering a series of glitter-stained fingernail scratches across the face. Other rapidly alternating still images of eye surgery and a couple in the midst of intercourse. The soundtrack is a continuous looped recording of the word "destroy" over the entire length of the film.

“The screen, illuminated by Paul Sharits’ N:O:T:H:I:N:G, seems to assume a spherical shape, at times – due, I think, to a pearl-like quality of light his flash-frames create … a baroque pearl, one might say – wondrous! … One of the most beautiful films I’ve seen.” – Stan Brakhage

In Razor Blades, Paul SHARITS consciously challenges our eyes, ears and minds to withstand a barrage of high powered and often contradictory stimuli. In a careful juxtaposition and fusion of these elements on different parts of our being, usually occurring simultaneously, we feel at times hypnotised and re-educated by some potent and mysterious force.

Paul Shartis's Ray Gun Virus (1966) is a transfixing, must-see-in-person “flicker” film that distills the cinematic experience to projected light and color patterns, allowing “the viewer to become aware of the electrical-chemical functioning of his own nervous system.”

Each film frame is a different image from the Sears Roebuck mail order catalogue. The film places pictures of the objects sold by Sears to the consumer society side by side with pictures of female models

Single frame exposures of words.

Blank color frequencies space out and optically feed into black and white images of one lovemaking act which is seen simultaneously from both sides of its space and both ends of its time.

Toilet paper event, single frame exposures.

Various gestures of hand held razorblade, single frame exposures.

Single frame exposures of dot-screens.

Discovered in summer of 1985, of a set of “haiku-imagistic films” I did before coming to my characteristic style, as in Ray Gun Virus; I thought I’d destroyed all these pre-pure films, in about 1969-1970, the time of my separation from my first marriage. The film concerns my marriage, which lasted seven years; it was shot during its first year, when I was a painting student at the University of Denver. It is full of apprehensions, in a montage style which counterposes “opposites”: sexuality and religion; seasonal opposites; hopefulness undercut by fears of eventual separation (the image of a statue of two women, arm in arm, reading a book). I find it visually and kinetically interesting, after all these years. (Paul Sharits) —Canyon Cinema