Christopher Sharits

Paul Sharits passed away in 1993 at the age of 50. He was a master of the flicker film, motion pictures that essentially consist of frames of pure colour presented in rapidly changing order. As the spectator sees these progressive, sometimes violent bursts of light, he or she will often – subjectively – apprehend complimentary colours, afterimages, and moving shape which are not in the films. Stuart Liebman writes that in Sharits’ films a new kind of space is created: “a dynamic, purely optical space, shifting between two and three dimensions… The oscillating colours not only foreground the pulsing light beam, they also reflexivity remind the viewer of the physicality of the frame and of the surface on which film are projected.” Sharits himself, in 1967, declared his creative agenda, which he then pursued over the next quarter century: “I wish to abandon imitation and illusion and enter directly into the higher drama of: celluloid; two dimensional strips; individual rectangular frame; the nature of sprockets and emulsion; projector operations; the three dimensional reflective screen surface; the retinal screen; optic nerve and individual psycho-physical subjectivities of consciousness. In his cinematic drama, light is energy rather than a tool for the representation of non-filmic objects, shapes and textures.”