Sound Strip/Film Strip

Discovered in summer of 1985, of a set of “haiku-imagistic films” I did before coming to my characteristic style, as in Ray Gun Virus; I thought I’d destroyed all these pre-pure films, in about 1969-1970, the time of my separation from my first marriage. The film concerns my marriage, which lasted seven years; it was shot during its first year, when I was a painting student at the University of Denver. It is full of apprehensions, in a montage style which counterposes “opposites”: sexuality and religion; seasonal opposites; hopefulness undercut by fears of eventual separation (the image of a statue of two women, arm in arm, reading a book). I find it visually and kinetically interesting, after all these years. (Paul Sharits) —Canyon Cinema

A series of tail ends of varied strips of film, with sometimes recognizable images dissolving into light flares, appear to run through and off of a projector. A romantic "narrative," suggesting an "ending," is inferred. This film can be projected at either sound speed (3 minutes) or silent speed (5 minutes).

Single frame exposures of words.

Various gestures of hand held razorblade, single frame exposures.

T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G uses flickering frames of solid color juxtaposed with positive and negative still images of a man—sometimes cutting off his own tongue with glitter-covered scissors, sometimes suffering a series of glitter-stained fingernail scratches across the face. Other rapidly alternating still images of eye surgery and a couple in the midst of intercourse. The soundtrack is a continuous looped recording of the word "destroy" over the entire length of the film.

Two reels of mis-takes in shooting Part II of 3RD DEGREE; Film was loaded in camera improperly and the image slides about off-center and becomes blurred, creating some rather amusing and mysterious imagery. A made “found” object.

“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

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.

In Razor Blades, Paul SHARITS consciously challenges our eyes, ears and minds to withstand a barrage of high powered and often contradictory stimuli. In a careful juxtaposition and fusion of these elements on different parts of our being, usually occurring simultaneously, we feel at times hypnotised and re-educated by some potent and mysterious force.

Streaming, scratched lines continuously appear two at a time over images of flowing water.

Toilet paper event, single frame exposures.

Feature-length compilation program presenting 37 out of 41 original fluxfilms produced and directed in the 1960s by Fluxus artists, including George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Robert Watts, Paul Sharits, et al.

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

Three-screen film. On the first screen, close-ups of an agitated match in front of a young woman's fearful face. On the soundtrack: matches, warnings of a rattlesnake, the phrase: "Listen, I will not speak." The ribbon runs at variable speeds, sometimes blurring, sometimes slowing down, to stop, on which the image / celluloid begins to fry and to burn, then leaves, runs, stops again, leaves again ... On the second screen we see the first rephotographed; here the "burns" are both fixed or new (a burn in the second degree). On the third screen, we see the second screen rephotographed. The subject of the film is the fragility of the film, as medium, as well as the vulnerability of man. Both the film and the figure resist threats / intimidation / mutilations.

"There is a paradox in such artistically special (and significant) films as Sharits' very real and reflexively beautiful AXIOMATIC GRANULARITY. It is that in becoming so accessible and authentic through its refusal to be anything but itself - emulsion grain seen in color and movement - the film for most viewers is likely to be impenetrable ... the film begins to evoke a quiet flow of thought. That thought, however, is repeatedly returned to the light perceived on the screen as the film calls attention to itself through the random appearances of scratches, becoming simply and pleasantly what it is, refreshingly nothing more." - Anthony Bannon, Buffalo Evening News

The visual "degeneration" of the image ... through successive rephotography is paralleled by the compression of verbal information to the point of its loss of legibility; yet, both the "degenerated" sound and image are perceptually engaging, even in the most advanced stages of "degeneration". It is obvious why the film has its title, because of the strategies of its coming into being, but, paradoxically, at the level of effect, its dynamics arise from its "Episodic Degeneration".