Trained as a graphic artist and a painter, Paul Sharits became an avant-garde filmmaker noted for manipulating the film stock itself to create a variety of fascinating, abstract light and colorplays when projected on the screen. Fans hail the effects hallucinogenic, while his detractors find them garish. Sharits is also known for establishing experimental film groups at prominent universities, including one at the University of Indiana where he studied. He later taught and developed an undergraduate film program at Antioch College. Between 1973 and 1992, Sharits taught at the Center for Media Study at the State University of New York. His films can be seen in various U.S. and European museums, film centers, and libraries. Much of his work can be found in the Anthology Film Archives in New York City.
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. ...
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'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 psych ...
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A chronicle of Sharits' 1977 visit to Romania to experience three of Brancusi's most famous sculptures. ...
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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 bl ...
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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. ...
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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 mo ...
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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. ...
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The films are of two patients, extracted from a medical film study of brain wave activity during seizures. ...
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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 fortifica ...
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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 ...
Watch NowFilm by Paul Sharits presented as double projection theatrically and quadruple projection in galleries. ...
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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 ...
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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 ent ...
Watch NowSharits 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 ...
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Sound Strip / Film Strip is Paul Sharits' first "Locational" work, made in collaboration with Bill Brand. The piece was commissioned for the 1972 opening exhibition of the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston,Texas. "...Sound Strip / Film Strip consists of f ...
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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 ...
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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 acr ...
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"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 f ...
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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 ...
Watch NowPaul 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 ner ...
Watch NowBlank color frequencies space out and optically feed into monochrome images of one lovemaking act which is seen simultaneously from both sides of its space and both ends of its time. ...
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Each film frame is a different image from the Sears Roebuck mail order catalogue. ...
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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. T ...
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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 vo ...
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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 ...
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Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades. ...
Watch Now'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 psych ...
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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 ...
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"Freud established that jokes were structurally akin to dreams in their use of condensation, displacement, representation by opposites, punning and 'nonsense'. All of these strategies are much in evidence in (Land's) marvelously duplicitous ON THE MARRIAGE ...
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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. ...
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