Repetition, Flicker, and Sound in the Films of Paul Sharits

Paul Sharits (1943-1993) was an American film artist, a proponent of what Peter Gidal, P. Adams Sitney, and Anette Michelson referred to as “structural film” (Sitney 2002, 348). This 1960s avant-garde film movement foregrounded a film structure ahead of its content. Sharits was trained as a graphic artist and painter. His 16mm films were concerned with flicker, abstract light plays that created visceral perceptual effects both in sound and image that have been taken up more recently in the expanded proto-cinema of Bruce McLure. These films were often multi-projector. Shutter Interface (1975) consists of four 16mm projectors with four soundtracks on a continuous loop. His flicker films include Ray Gun Virus (1966), Piece Mandala/End War (1966), N:O:T:H:I:N:G (1968), and T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1969), which are the main focus of this discussion.