"I´d like to give up imitation and Illusion and I'd like to enter the higher drama of Celluloid, 2 dimensional film stripes, individual images, nature of perforation and emulsion, projector operations ... Light as energy creates its own objects, shadows and textures. If you take the facts of the retina, the flicker mechanism of film projection than you can make films without logic of language."
— Paul Sharits
I count Sharits among my 10 favourite filmmakers, and he’s one of 3 or 4 filmmakers who reminds me, every time I’m sitting in a theatre or a gallery looking at his work, that this isn’t marginal for me, this isn’t counter-cinema: as with Michael Snow and Stan Brakhage, Sharits found a cinematic language that doesn’t depend on its dialogue with the dominant Hollywood narrative. Instead, in each case these filmmakers put forward, in their works and in their writing, what film does best. In other words, when I’m watching Epileptic Seizure Comparison (Sharits), Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot (thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (Michael Snow), or Dog Star Man: Prelude, I am completely convinced that this is “normal”, that this is why the gods gave us cinema. Because even the most radical documentary, like Emile de Antonio’s Year of the Pig, ultimately uses the representational and storytelling conventions of mainstream filmmaking, I don’t feel the same way about it. I love it, but in a way it’s just another movie. I’ll go out on a limb and say the same about Bresson’s Mouchette: it’s brilliant, and it definitely puts a few stakes in the ground as far as film form goes, but it’s still kind of like Hollywood at the end of the day.
To be clear, none of this matters if my experience of watching Sharits's films (every single one that I’ve seen) didn’t have something I have to call a spiritual effect on me, one achieved at the level of the retina and the ear, and involving or invoking: intense cutting (in more than one sense), repetition, trance states, synesthesia, hallucination, nausea, paranoia, mania, psychic breakthroughs, relief. And each time I watch even one film by Sharits, it’s a clear reminder to me that this is what I want. I’ll take everything else too, but this is what normal looks like.
You can find a few of Sharits’s films online (on ubu.com and elsewhere), and if you’re lucky you will see them at a rare avant-garde screening in cities like Toronto, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Denver, or Buffalo (Sharits’s hometown for many years). See this work on 16mm, or as installation work, if you possibly can.
I am attaching a great interview with Sharits by Gerald O’Grady. Gerald is a special person and I think I should save my discussion of him for another X/500 instalment. http://www.ubu.com/film/sharits_interview.html. I am also embedding the final movement of T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, a film that was a regular with the Inns Film Society, one that we included in our 25th anniversary reunion screening, where it continued to alienate and freak out even some of our core members.
