Paul Sharits (1943-1993)

Film Section                                                                                                        Visiting Filmmaker Paul Sharits

Museum of Art                                                                                                    Tuesday, Sept 20 1977

Carnegie Institute                                                                                                 3:00 PM

TAILS (1977) 3 min. Super-3mm. Version

SHUTTER INTERFACE (1975/77) 15 min. American premier of the new format of this film, employing two simultaneous superimposed images and variable focal length lenses on the projectors. Shown this year at the G. Pompideu Centre National d’Art et de Culture (National Museum of Modern Art) at Beaubourg, in Paris, and the international biennial Dokumenta Exhibition in Kassel, West Germany.

DECLARATIVE MODE (1977) 45 min. A world premiere.

Excerpts from a Letter to the Film Section, Feb 1977

Dear Bill:

                “I am one of three persons in New York State who has received a Bicentennial Film Grant. My project in the only one of the three which is intentionally a work of art. I am in the process of producing a 45 minute long, wide screen, color and sound work which is described in the enclosed copy of my grant proposal. DECLARATIVE ME will be an energetic, “abstract” celebration of Jefferson’s radical stance against slavery. The sound track is based upon a little-known section of Jefferson’s original draft of the “Declaration of Independence,” in which he denounced racism and slavery: the text was omitted by Congress from the final draft of the “Declaration.”

                …Although it is, in a sense, an abstract work, it is nevertheless a political statement and addresses itself to the Nation (a nation still troubled by racism)…

                The film is being shot from 15, 17” x 22” color coded drawings. From these drawings, 15 more drawing-studies for “Frozen Film Frames” are being made. (Frozen Film Frames are film strips sandwiched between sheets of clear plexiglass.)DECLARATIVE MODE is composed of five movements: each movement will be put into 5’2” x 6” “FFF’s.” I am hoping that one of the six museums premiering DECLARATIVE MODE will care to also display either one or both sets of works related to the film.

Proposal for Bicentennial Film Project, titled DECLARATIVE MODE

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 to opportunity to undertake such a filmic enterprise seems, to me, a very appropriate Bicentennial project.