2014 / digital / 85min. (Canada)
　　
Long after his premature death, the impact of Paul Sharits lingers on. The prominent iconoclast and innovator provoked with fast-flickering, pulsating, colorful mosaics. The many interviews and testimonies are also a portrait of a generation of leading voices in experimental filmmaking.

　

Paul SHARITS

American avant-garde “experimental” filmmaker, artist, and professor of media studies, Paul Sharits was born in Denver, Colorado on February 7, 1943. Tragically, he died on July 8, 1993 in his home in Buffalo, NY. He is survived by his son, Christopher, Christopher’s wife Cheri, and three grandsons. 

Paul is widely known for his structural films, the use of multiple projectors, infinite film loops, experimental soundtracks, and interventions at the level of the filmstrip in order to realize his elemental mode of cinematic presentation. Paul went to The University of Denver’s School of Art (DU) where he earned a BFA in Fine Arts. At the time he was known as a young painter, however, he had been making films since high school. While studying art at DU, he began a mentorship with Stan Brakhage that soon became a lifelong friendship. Stan’s manipulation of film structure through experimental and “scratch” film’s influence is evident in Paul’s early work. 

In 1964, he attended Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana for his MFA in visual design. After he received his MFA, he moved his family which consisted of his son, Christopher, and his wife, Frances, to Baltimore, Maryland where he taught at The Maryland Art Institute. Later, he taught at and became a pinnacle force behind the development of the Center for Media Studies at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He divorced his wife in 1968. Shortly thereafter, he was recruited by Dr. Gerry O’Grady at The University of Buffalo Center for Media Studies along with the most prominent emerging experimental filmmakers of the time which included James Blue, Hollis Frampton, Tony Bannon, Tony Conrad, and later, Peter Weibel.

Paul enjoyed relative acknowledgement during his lifetime, with shows at the Bykert Gallery, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and Walker Art Center among other institutions, and has been posthumously exhibited at the Whitney Museum, MoMA, Pompidou, Louvre, and the Burchfield-Penney Art Center in Buffalo, New York as well as the widely renowned Greene Naftali Gallery exhibition of both his works on paper and his four projector installation “Shutter Interface” which was nominated for “Solo Exhibition of the Year” at the 2009 First Annual Art Awards at the NYC Guggenheim Museum. The four projector “Shutter Interface” installation was acquired by and is now on exhibition in the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.. Trained initially as a painter, and a prolific theoretical writer, Sharits’ art-making was in fact wide-ranging, evidenced by his early involvement with Fluxus artists in New York. His many works on paper-from diagrams to abstract film scores, fashion drawings, and hallucinogenic illustrations-have yet to be fully integrated into his better-known body of work. (Christopher Sharits, 2010)
　

François MIRON

He began makings films in 1982, working exclusively with emulsion (as in film NOT video) the body of his early work consist of several short experimental films, all created using a powerful film image manipulation technique that he has mastered: optical printing, in 1990 he received an MFA in filmmaking from The School of The Art Institute Of Chicago where he went under a full merit scholarship, all of his films have been screened in festivals and all sorts of venues throughout the world, his work received numerous awards and true underground acclaim, aside from this, the director creates and shoot music videos, photography and since 1993 he has been teaching optical printing, filmmaking, and technical aspects of films at the Mel Hoppenheim School Of Cinema in Montreal. The filmmaker has had full retrospective of his work in San Francisco, Humboldt, The Parc Cinema in Montreal and at the Cinematheque Quebecoise in Montreal. In 2007 he completed production on THE 4TH LIFE a 35mm. feature film project written with James Galwey, the film has had international festival release and Canadian theatrical release. In 2008 he won a Juno Award for his photographic work for Arcade Fire for the cover of the Neon Bible CD which was extracted from images that he shot in 16mm B/W and color reversal film, the same year he won the Prix a la creation artistique from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec for his film HYMN TO PAN. The director has now just completed a complex documentary on legendary Avant-Garde filmmaker Paul Sharits the film took 5 years to complete.
　

Schedule

TOKYO Park tower：4/29 18:45 Program R
TOKYO Image forum：5/2 21:15 Program R
KYOTO：5/22 14:40 Program R
YOKOHAMA：5/30 14:00 Program R
NAGOYA：6/26 19:00 Program R