Paul Sharits (1943-1993)

New York State Council on the Arts

Paul Sharits

537 Lafayette Avenue, Buffalo NY 14222

(716) 885-0398

Proposal for Bicentennial Film Project, titled “Declarative Mode!”

(40 minute, color-sound, 16mm)

I have long been an admirer of Thomas Jefferson and his ideals; during the past year, after having begun reading Dr. Dumas Malone’s six-volume biography, Jefferson and His Time, my admiration has not only deepened but has crystallized into a desire to make a dedicatory “tone poem” to Jefferson, in the form of an intense “abstract-musical” film- a film in which I would attempt to celebrate, by rhythms-melodies-chords of pure color and sound (computer articulated spoken text), the spirit and structure of Jefferson’s major statement, The Declaration of Independence (which he felt was his highest achievement). To be afforded the opportunity to undertake such a filmic enterprise seems, to me, a very appropriate Bicentennial project.

The style of the 40 minute long film I am proposing—which would be titled, “Declarative Mode!”—is a continuation of several recurring modes in work of the last ten years; it would be a higher refinement and synthesis of these modes, an energetic amplification of films’ perceptual potentialities to support and emphasize the grand scale of sentiment and declarative spirit of Jefferson’s remarkable text. I would attempt to have the film’s sound and image relations correspond aesthetically to the Declaration’s form, its ranges of semantic and syntactical structures, its passage of fluid, jubilant idealism to its staccato moments of outrage [toward] and condemnation of King George’s “repeated injuries and usurpations” would reinsert into the text the condemnation of the slave trade, which the Congress deleted from Jefferson’s original statement.