New prints: Piece Mandala/End War, Word Movie and T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G by Paul Sharits
Posted September 27th, 2018 in New Acquisitions, News / Events
New prints of Paul Sharits’ flicker films Word Movie, Piece Mandala/End War, and T, O, U, C, H, I, N, G, have arrived at Canyon and are now in circulation!
T, O, U, C, H, I, N, G (1968 | 12 minutes | COLOR | SOUND)
Starring poet David Franks whose voice appears on soundtrack/an uncutting and unscratching mandala.
“Merges violence with purity.” – P. Adams Sitney
“Surrealist tour-de-force.” – Parker Tyler
On “10 Best Films of 1969” lists of Soren Agenoux and Jonas Mekas.
Piece Mandala / End War (1966 | 5 minutes | COLOR/B&W | SILENT)
Blank color frequencies space out and optically feed into black and white images of one lovemaking act which is seen simultaneously from both sides of its space and both ends of its time.
“Thanks for the strip … it IS that/cut to the bone of some matter that does really concern me: how a man and a woman meet nakedly head-on among the colors … lovely: I can hardly wait to see the entirety of that vision ….” – Stan Brakhage
“PIECE MANDALA/END WAR reminds me very much of the back light (GoKo) which illuminates the spirit of Buddha – yet no image of Buddha appears; rather, a couple of naked bodies. I have never imagined that GoKo could really happen and illuminate as in this film.” – Takahiko Iimura, Film Art
Please note this is silent. Paul Sharits prefered the silent version and this is it.
Word Movie (Flux Film 29) (1966 | 4 minutes | COLOR | SOUND)
Approximately 50 words visually “repeated” in varying sequential and positioned relationships/spoken word soundtrack/structured, each frame being a different word or word fragment, so that the individual words optically-conceptually fuse into one three and three-quarter minute-long word.
