by Paul Sharits (1966)
16 mm, color, sound, 4 min
Reading video: a speeding flicker film of passing words, playing with the mind’s desire to make sense of them — an effect of the phenomenon of retinal persistence.
Paul Sharits is one of the main protagonists of structuralist film, and together with Tony Conrad one of the inventors of the so-called »flicker« genre. Trained in painting and visual design, he completed his first color flicker films in 1966. Sharits negates filmic illusion, and places the focus on the function and materiality of film, as well as on the viewers’ subjective perception.
Later, Paul Sharits was one of the first artists to explore and establish the inclusion of 16mm films projections in gallery/museum spaces. In his Statement Regarding Multiple Screen/Sound Film Environments-Installations, published in Film Culture in 1978, he intended to define the fundamental principles for a new cinema. This new cinema seemed to be much more engaged with the actual production of social experiences and exchange than with traditional exhibiting methods. Films -and other filmic forms of exhibition- had to be exhibited in public spaces of free access, according to Sharits, in which people could come and go without temporal predetermined impositions. For this reason, Sharits postulated, the presentation forms of these new film-events required a non-evolutional organization but an open, transforming and natural structure. His circularly structured films allowed filmic reproduction in loop, permitting a continuous perception.
To read the video, simply click on the image or the link below. Enjoy.
http://ubu.artmob.ca/video/fluxfilm_29_word_sharits.mpg
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