Artists & Works

STYLE: MASS MEDIA,
FILM

Paul Sharits studied painting and design at the University of Denver and the University of Indiana, but was also active in film, starting experimental film groups on both campuses. Sharits spent much of his career in the University at Buffalo Media Studies program, where he directed undergraduate studies and taught. Sharits developed a unique abstract filmmaking style, so abstract that it was a natural step for him to transform his film frames into elegant works of art. He painted throughout the seventies and eighties, though his painting style developed into a more aggressive expressionism in the eighties.

Sharits is most well-known for his “flicker films,” which were made up of solidly colored, black, and white frames, as well as other non-narrative films which explored combining imagery with the rhythms of speech. Sharits, trained as a painter, often moved back and forth between drawing ideas on paper and creating them in film, as these drawings demonstrate.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Paul Sharits, Film Culture 65-66, 1978
“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."