Paul Sharits
Biography: Trained as a graphic artist and a painter, Paul Sharits became an avant-garde filmmaker noted for manipulating the film stock itself to create a variety of fascinating, abstract light and colorplays when projected on the screen. Fans hail the effects hallucinogenic, while his detractors find them garish. Sharits is also known for establishing experimental film groups at prominent universities, including one at the University of Indiana where he studied. He later taught and developed an undergraduate film program at Antioch College. Between 1973 and 1992, Sharits taught at the Center for Media Study at the State University of New York. His films can be seen in various U.S. and European museums, film centers, and libraries. Much of his work can be found in the Anthology Film Archives in New York City. ~ Sandra Brennan,
Place of Birth: Not available
Birthday: February 07, 1943
Deathday: July 08, 1993
Popularity:
Known For
Home Movies 1971-81
1985-01-01
Home Movies 1971-81
Overview: Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: xx
Release Date: 1985-01-01
Popularity:
Paul Sharits
2015-01-22
Paul Sharits
Overview: Long after his premature death, the impact of Paul Sharits lingers on. The prominent iconoclast and innovator provoked with fast-flickering, pulsating, colourful mosaics. The many interviews and testimonies are also a portrait of a generation of leading voices in experimental filmmaking.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2015-01-22
Popularity:
Rapture
1987-01-01
Rapture
Overview: 'Rapture' is a fierce vision of a Dionysian experience, a tightly controlled visual statement about the abandonment of self to heightened transportive states. It is also an exploration of the similarity between 'religious' and 'visionary' ecstasy and psychotic states.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1987-01-01
Popularity:
Paul Sharits Interview with Gerard O'Grady
1976-05-16
Paul Sharits Interview with Gerard O'Grady
Overview: This is a rare video interview with one of America’s finest film artists, shot in New York towards the end of his abruptly terminated career.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1976-05-16
Popularity:
Birth of a Nation
1997-08-06
Birth of a Nation
Overview: Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1997-08-06
Popularity:
Cinématon
1978-12-20
Cinématon
Overview: Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1978-12-20
Popularity:
Cinématon XIII
1981-11-08
Cinématon XIII
Overview: Reel 13 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1981-11-08
Popularity:
Cinématon n°120 : Paul Sharits
Cinématon n°120 : Paul Sharits
Overview:
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: fr
Release Date:
Popularity:
Funtime at the Vasulkas
2006-01-01
Funtime at the Vasulkas
Overview: A recording of a meeting in the studio where Jeffrey Schier and Woody show colleagues and teachers a new tool. Between 1976 and 1980, Woody and Schier designed a prototype device, the Vasulka Imaging System, or Digital Image Articulator. It was one of the first digital audiovisual tools to generate image algorithms and convert them to an analog signal. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Department of Media Study at the State University of New York at Buffalo became one of these places of, teaching and mediating, in the area of Media Art, developing into what was perhaps to the most influential school for media in the twentieth century. Teaching there under the leadership of the founder Gerald O’Grady were the (meanwhile canonized) structuralist, avantgarde filmmakers Hollis Frampton, Tony Conrad, and Paul Sharits, documentary filmmaker James Blue, video artists Steina and Woody Vasulka, and Peter Weibel.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2006-01-01
Popularity:
On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, or Can the Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed?
1977-01-01
On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, or Can the Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed?
Overview: “Freud established that jokes were structurally akin to dreams in their use of condensation, displacement, representation by opposites, punning and ‘nonsense’. All of these strategies are much in evidence in (Land’s) marvelously duplicitous ON THE MARRIAGE BROKER JOKE… [...] so clever and original a filmmaker as to make most others – not to mention his critics – seem flat-footed by comparison. ON THE MARRIAGE BROKER JOKE harks back to Bunuel’s early work. Not only is it structured like a dream and filled with sexual imagery, but like Un Chien Andalou, it smacks of being an insider’s joke played upon the avant-garde. Where Bunuel used the insights of psychoanalysis to satirize Christianity, Land– with an almost equal perversity – reverses the process and uses Christianity to send up Freud.” – J. Hoberman, American Film
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1977-01-01
Popularity: