“The question ‘What is cinema?’ is rather open.” Paul Sharits
A pioneer of the flicker film, Paul Sharits (1943–93) trained in painting and graphic design before turning to film, a background apparent throughout his work, which juxtaposes intense pulses of color with repeated words or sound tones, and often takes the form of multiprojector pieces or installations. His ultimate goal was to retrain viewers’ senses, which he saw as caught up in the overloading stimuli of the “electric age.” Sharits envisioned his films—with their equal parts abrasion and elegance—as a type of perceptual retuning or shock treatment that could reawaken viewers’ dulled capacities for feeling and cognition. In a vivid endorsement, Stan Brakhage characterized Sharits’s cinema as a “healing fever cycle” that could be felt flooding through the viewer’s veins.
A long-time teacher at SUNY Buffalo, Sharits’ model of education, which he called Cinematics, taught students how to “improvise/synthesize ‘creative action’” in order to bring about “entirely new definitions of the film viewing and making enterprise.” Tracing the legacy of this pedagogical aim, this retrospective series, featuring many new preservation prints, surveys Sharits’s career as he continuously evolves what it means to “open up” the cinematic medium.
A piece from Paul Sharits’s Frozen Film Frame series (c. 1969), which consists of serial arrangements of colored filmstrips encased in suspended plastic, will be on display at BAM/PFA during this series.
Jennifer Pranolo, Guest Curator
Jennifer Pranolo is a doctoral student in Rhetoric and Film and Media at UC Berkeley. Paul Sharits: An Open Cinema is a project of the UC Berkeley graduate course in film curating taught spring semester 2011 by BAM/PFA curators Kathy Geritz and Steve Seid. Cosponsored by the Department of Film and Media. With thanks to Andrew Lampert and Matthew Cowan, Anthology Film Archives; Dominic Angerame, Canyon Cinema; M.M. Serra, Film-makers’ Coop; Barney Bailey, BAM/PFA.
Wednesday / 10.05.11
7:30
Paul Sharits: Early Work
Paul Sharits (U.S., 1966–1971)
In Person Federico Windhausen.
Federico Windhausen writes about experimental film and video and teaches film history at California College of the Arts.
The interaction and conflict between text and image, seeing and hearing is foremost in Sharits’s early films, which make provocative reference to sexuality, violence, and self-destruction amidst striking formal experimentation with dueling visual and audio tracks. Sound and image blur and layer into indistinguishable flows of color and sense. Jennifer Pranolo
Word Movie/Flux Film 1966, 4 mins, Color, 16mm, From Canyon Cinema.
Razor Blades 1965–68, 25 mins, Color, 16mm two-screen projection, From Anthology Film Archives.
T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G 1968, 12 mins, Color, 16mm, From Anthology Film Archives.
Inferential Current 1971, 8 mins, Color, 16mm, From Anthology Film Archives.
Total running time: c. 50 mins
Wednesday / 10.12.11
7:30
Paul Sharits: Midcareer Work
Paul Sharits (U.S., 1973–76)
In Person Guest curator Jennifer Pranolo
Following his philosophy of Cinematics, Sharits began making films that were meant to push perceptual limits, “so that one cannot tell whether or not what one is experiencing is in the work or in oneself.” The labor behind this bodily synesthesia is illustrated in Analytical Studies III, which shows Sharits and his students at work, and in the gloriously “pulsating dialectic” of the two-screen Shutter Interface. Jennifer Pranolo
Analytical Studies III: Color Frame Passages 1973–74, 22 mins, Color, 16mm, From Canyon Cinema.
Shutter Interface 1975, 24 mins, Color, 16mm two-screen projection, From Film-makers’ Co-op.
Tails 1976, 3 mins, Silent, Color, 16mm, From Canyon Cinema.
Total running time: c. 50 mins
Thursday / 10.13.11
7:30
Paul Sharits: Late Work
Paul Sharits (U.S., 1975–82)
In Person Guest curator Jennifer Pranolo
Towards the end of his career, Sharits turned to visceral icons of pathology and decay. The disintegration of the body and the decomposition of the filmic material became corollary metaphors in disturbing—and at times extraordinarily beautiful—assaults on the viewer’s consciousness. Jennifer Pranolo
Total running time: 71 mins
PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE
Film Program Information
(24-hour recording):
(510) 642-1124
Location
2575 Bancroft Way
Between College and Telegraph
PFA Theater Box Office Hours
Opens one hour before the first showtime of the day
Theater Admission Prices
Single Feature
$5.50 BAM/PFA members
UC Berkeley students
$9.50 Adults (18-64)
$6.50 UC Berkeley faculty and staff
Non-UC Berkeley students
Senior citizens (65 & over)
Disabled persons
Youth (17 & under)
Additional Feature
$4 All patrons
