S:TREAM:S:S:ECTION:S:ECTION:S:S:ECTIONED

A conceptual lap dissolve from “water currents” to “film strip current.” Dedicated to my son, Christopher. (PS) “In his earlier flicker films, Sharits explored the mechanisms of perception and projection, and now he takes his investigations to their logical extreme – to the nature of the film-strip itself. His analysis is constructed on close-up footage of water currents in a streambed. In each of the three, fourteen-minute loops, he progressively decreases the number of superimposed current directions from six to one. On this film he adds continuous straight scratch lines in multiples of three, so that by the end of the work the screen is a grill of twenty-four lines, behind which we see the coursing water. “The sound track, operating on entirely different rhythms, is a series of word loops. Superimposed are electronic “beeps” that phase into sync with their splice-dam referents. The fascination and energy of the film derive from its multi-dimensional dialectics, in which all available systems of experience are contrasted with their logical opposites/complements: sound against vision, film as representation against film as object, circular against linear structure, progression against regression, part against whole, meaning against abstraction. “What makes this work especially compelling is that its succinct formal analysis is accommodated in the purely sensual experience offered by the free-form motion and colours of the stream, and the antiphonal approach and retreat of the voices. Sharits creates both lyricism and drama from celluloid itself.” – David James, Art and Cinema Catalogue