Paul Sharits

3rd Degree

Paul Sharits

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.

Fluxfilm Anthology 1962-1970

Mike Parr, Owen Land

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.

Shutter Interface

Paul Sharits

Two projectors pulse in tandem

Birth of a Nation

Jonas Mekas

Chantal Akerman, Kenneth Anger

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

Paul Sharits

François Miron

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.

Epileptic Seizure Comparison

Paul Sharits

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

S:TREAM:S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED

Paul Sharits

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

Ray Gun Virus

Paul Sharits

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.”

Razor Blades

Paul Sharits

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.

Wintercourse

Paul Sharits

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

Cinématon

Gérard Courant

Gérard Courant, Alain-Alcide Sudre

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.

Word Movie

Paul Sharits

Robert Forth, Barbara Forth

Single frame exposures of words.

Piece Mandala/End War

Paul Sharits

Blank 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.

Bad Burns

Paul Sharits

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

Tails

Paul Sharits

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.

T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G

Paul Sharits

David Franks

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.