Paul Sharits: Analytical Studies I-IV
Saturday, December 19, 3-8pm
Artists Space, 38 Greene Street, 3rd Floor
New York, New York
More info at: http://www.artistsspace.org/share/summerknowledge.pdf
This past Saturday I was invited to participate in Summer Knowledge at Artists Space to introduce Paul Shartis' Analytical Studies II: Unframed Lines.
Made between 1971 and 1976, Paul Sharits' rarely-shown series Analytical Studies consists of four sections, each devoted to a specific aspect of film technology, containing several sub-sections that play through various formal permutations of the given characteristic. This event took place over an afternoon, with each work introduced by a guest speaker and followed with a panel discussion on Sharits' work. Speakers included: Branden W. Joseph, Sandra Gibson, Bill Brand, Melissa Ragona, and Luis Recoder. Paul Sharits: Analytical Studies I-IV is the final program of Summer Knowledge, curated by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, a series of one-person screenings presenting a multi-generational selection of artists working in the moving image.
As part of a film jury in Holland in 2006, I was asked to screen two of my favorite films. I chose Document by Coleen Fitzgibbon and this film by Sharits. I have only seen this film twice before but as a filmmaker I find it inspirational and a pleasure to watch. These "analytical studies' don't seem more analytical to me than some of the more flicker films by Sharits, and seem more gestural and performative experiences. They don't speak to me as references to musical quartets as Sharits initially intended with these pieces but stand alone purely as studies of the film strip inside the projection apparatus.
"When a film "loses its loop" it allows us to see a blurred strip of jerking frames; this is quite natural and quite compelling subject material. I am currently exploring, it could thought of as "dis-framing." I am developing another approach to simultaneously reveal both the frame and the strip nature of film (which are both normally hidden due to the intermittent shutter system), by removing the gripper arm and shutter mechanism from the projector…" Paul Sharits, Film Culture 65-66 -1978, page 6
So normally we are watching the flow of film footage through the projector but don't think about this unless there is a "problem," a "mistake," an "accident." There is a push and pull between the filmstrip itself and the projector. They are two separate things, or as Sharits calls them "systems." The "gripper arm" or the claw is removed. The pressure plate and shutter is also removed, disemboweled, so that the filmstrip nature of the material can be seen as passing through the interior of the projector. All you have left is the gate, the bulb, the lens, and the manual multidirectional and superimposed passage of un-framed or dis-framed film material: A slide projector for film!
I feel that Sharits' ideas of film went far beyond the confines of film itself. It seems that he wanted to take apart, even destroy the mechanics of the medium in order to study and analyze his material as far as that material could lay itself bare. The mechanical nature - the mechanics of the medium. For me the work is a seduction as the film slips through the gate slipping into and taping into another cinematic desire deep within us.
Some related quotes I prepared my thoughts around for this event:
"This filmstrip is projected without the use of the shutter. It is pulled through the projector by hand at an irregular speed, moving ahead (or backwards) slowly or quickly, sometimes stopping, altering focus, and at times allowing the deteriorated emulsion and celluloid to burn in the gate." - Bradley Eros, There Will Be Projections in All Dimensions…" Millennium Film Journal, Paracinema / Performance, 2005, page 85
"As if taking his earlier signature color flicker films and effacing the structural integrity of their meticulously framed frame by frame registration, Sharits scratches and tears the film strip vertically thereby cutting through the latticework of frames and framelines, and ending as in Bardo Follies, in the burning through the film plane toward the white of the screen." - Luis Recoder, "The Death of Structural Film: Notes Towards a Filmless Cinema", Spectator #27, Special Issue: Death of Cinema, 2007, page 27
"The filmstrip's connection to the shutter is the bridge between the still images and the moving one. The filmstrip's testimony to that connection is the row of sprocket holes it must carry on one side: the material witness to its passage through the mechanical registry of time. Emulsion, strip, sprockets, shutter, frame, are the complex reality which comprises film's material basis. It is to this complex that Sharits addresses himself in his work." - Rosalind Krauss, Film Culture 65-66, Special Issue Paul Sharits, 1978, page 92
Sandra Gibson
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