Paul Sharits (l943-93)

Wintercourse (l962), l2 minutes

Ray Gun Virus (l966), l4 minutes

Word Movie/Fluxfilm (l966), 3.5 minutes

Piece Mandala/End War (l966), 5 minutes

Razor Blades (l965-68), two screens, 25 minutes

N.OT.H.I.N.G. (1968), 36 minutes

T.O.U.C.H.I.N.G. (l968), l2 minutes

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

(l968-7l), 42 minutes

Inferential Current (l97l), 8 minutes

Axiomatic Granularity (l972-73), 20 minutes

Analytical Studies I: The Film Frame (l972-76), 25 minutes

Analytical Studies II: Unframed Lines (l97l-76), 25 minutes

Analytic Studies III:Color Frame Passages (l973-74), 22 minutes

Analytical Studies IV: Blank Color Frames (l975-76), 20 minutes

Color Sound Frames (l974), 26.5 minutes

Apparent Motion (l975), 30 minutes

Episodic Generation (l976), 30 minutes

Epileptic Seizure Comparison (l976), 30 minutes

Tails (l976), 3 minutes

Declarative Mode (l976-77), two screens or a single screen, 40 minutes

3rd Degree (l982), 23 minutes

Bad Burns (l982), 6 minutes

Brancusi’s Sculpture Ensemble at Tirgu Jiu (l977-84), two screens, 2l minutes

While I was studying painting in the early l960s ... I was also making films ... I stopped painting in the middle l960s but became more and more engaged with film, attempting to isolate and essentialize aspects of its representationalism. I had also become most intrigued with the differences between reading and listening, or, more inclusively, the larger discontinuities between seeing and hearing; film, sound film, appeared to be the most natural medium for testing what thresholds of relatedness might exist between these perceptual modes. In making films, I have always been more interested in speech patterns, music and temporal pulses in nature than in the visual arts for exemplary models of composition (perhaps because I had studied music as a child, and had internalized musical forms of structuring)....

My early "flicker films"–wherein clusters of differentiated single frames of solid color can appear to almost blend or, each frame insisting upon its discreteness, can appear to aggressively vibrate–are filled with attempts to allow vision to function in ways usually particular to hearing."

"Hearing : Seeing," Film Culture 65-66, l978

"In his flicker films, Sharits replaces the consecutive phases of action with solidly colored or black or white frames. The effect is literally dazzling. The viewer sees often violent bursts of light whose color and intensity are functions of the speed at which the colored frames and the complimentary colors of spontaneously induced afterimages change. The oscillating colors not only foreground the pulsing light beam, they also reflexively remind the viewer of the physicality of the frame and of the surface on which films are projected. When colors change slowly, a flat, undifferentiated field fills the entire image. As the speed increases, however, random shapes appear that seem either to sink into an illusory depth or to project into the auditorium space. A dynamic, purely optical space, shifting between two and three dimensions, which is characteristic of our perception of the space in all films, is created."

–Stuart Liebman, l98l