Movies: 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 occ...

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...

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 for...

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 marri...

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years....

'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...

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...

While composed of pure/blank color frames (often “flickering”), this is not a “Structural Film”; there’s no predetermined overall structure to the work (which is, anyway, only “chapter one” of a sort of “abstract novel” in progress, a novel which can...

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 o...

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" c...

Single frame exposures of dot-screens....

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 o...

Footage of a strip of damaged film....

The footage, in order of appearance, is: 1. rock strata – along the banks of the Niagara River, before it empties into Lake Ontario, 1975, while an artist-in-residence at Artpark, Lewiston, N.Y. (Originally a three-screen panorama study); 2. flow p...

“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 fil...

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 t...

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

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