A concrete experience of nothing Paul Sharits's flickerfilms WILLIAM S. SMITH In Paul Sharits's 1968 filmN:0:T:H?N:G, a line clear, as he said, "even to the most naive viewer/'3 Yet, drawing of a lightbulb pulses intermittentlyon screen when set inmotion, in the midst of a screen flickering in an (fig. 1). The image recurs as part of animated apparently irregular, unpredictable patterns, the images sequence that extends over the course of the film. The can seem random as well. In a 1974 interview Sharits a lightbulb gradually transforms inways that suggest discussed his film from six years earlier, specifically as a play between its status sign of illumination and emphasizing this potential disjunction between his on itsunderlying dependency another bulb, the one compositional process and what the viewer perceives emitting light from the projector. As Sharits described it, on screen. "They are markers," he said of the lightbulb "upon retracting its light, the bulb becomes black and, images, "real metric markers?markers of time. But they are are impossibly, lights up the space around it.The bulb emits markers which you experientially unable to one burst of black lightand begins melting; at the end relate to."4 of thefilm the bulb isa black puddle at thebottom of Sharits's flicker films are rarely discussed in terms as as the screen."1 The sequence is striking it is simple, if of what they render experientially inaccessible. The a only because, aside from the brief appearance of chair relatively sizeable bibliography devoted to Sharits's photographed in the process of tipping over, the bulb is work tends to focus instead on what his films reveal, the only representational image in the thirty-six-minute especially about the nature of film as a medium. film. N:0:T:H:l:N:G one long Otherwise, is comprised "The effect is literallydazzling," critic wrote of of sets of entirely alternating monochromatic frames. the flickering in Sharits's films, "the oscillating colors The animated the lightbulb, retracting of light,and the not only foreground the pulsing lightbeam, they also drippingof theblack puddle all happen amid fieldsof reflexively remind the viewer of the physical limitof the color that flash and one another on at displace screen, frame and of the surface on which films are projected."5 a times frantically enough to produce stroboscopic effect In the late 1960s, Sharits described his own work in or "flicker." these terms. N:0:T:H:l:N:G, he said, would "strip As he had done with all of his films from that period, away anything (all present definitions of 'something') Sharits "scored" or out frame of "mapped" every standing in theway of the film being itsown reality."6 N:0:T:H:l:N:G to an according elaborate compositional Yet even as Sharits attempted to purge his work of what he to music. In a statement he process similar, said, writing called "non-filmic codes," the underlying reality of about the Sharits described how film, N:0:T:H:l:N:G the medium proved irreducible to a presentation of film follows a chromatic structure on symmetrical modeled frames, screens, and lightbeams. Despite the insistent, a Buddhist mandala.2 even Long stretches of warm-colored "dazzling" forms that his works could assume, frames and then retreat a gradually approach from cool in his theoretical writing from the 1970s Sharits also colored center. The lightbulb image, in all of itsdifferent suggested how his films could be considered in terms of this structure at intervals. or phases, punctuates precise what they displace withhold. Informed by research When the film strip is taken off of the projector reels and examined as a static object?a practice central to Sharits's work?the of these intervals becomes 3. in regularity Sharits, "Statement/' Drawing Distinctions: American Drawings of the cat. Seventies, exh. (Munich: Alfred Kren, 1981), p. 171. 4. Sharits in Linda Cathcart, "Interview," inDream Displacement and Other exh. cat. New Projects, (Buffalo, York: Albright-Knox Gallery, 1. P. Sharits, cited in P. A. Film: The American Sitney, Visionary 1976), unpaginated. Avant-Garde (New York: Oxford 386. University Press, 1979), p. 5. S. Liebman, Paul Sharits (St. Raul, Minn.: Film in the Cities and 2. Sharits, "N:0:T:H:l:N:G/ From an for a Film Application Grant," Walker Art Center, 1981), p. 11. Culture, no. 47 (1969):15. 6. Sharits (see note 2), p. 15. This content downloaded from 165.123.34.86 on Tue, 14 May 2013 13:39:25 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 280 RES 55/56 SPRING/AUTUMN 2009 into systems and information theory, Sharits developed a theoretical framework within which these moments of withholding?the "experientially unable to relate to"?were not just an inherent part of his films, but were also a precondition of their reception. N:0:T:H:l:N:G is the last in a series of flicker films on based mandala structures, including Ray Gun Virus (1966), Piece Mandala/End War (1966), and T,0,U,C,H,l,N,G (1968), which Sharits made between 1965 and 1968/ The 1960s were something of a golden age for flicker films. Peter Kubelka produced what is to __B^mI%^''^ _____ generally considered be the first,Arnulf Rainer in 1960, and Tony Conrad premiered The Flicker in New York in 1966.8 While Sharits was neither the first nor only artist to make flicker films, his engagement with the formwas the most sustained and complex. Beginning with Ray Gun Virus and culminating in N:0:T:H:l:N:G, he layered the flickerwith color, sound, and representational imagery. That there should be such a genre as the "flicker film," and that Sharits would be far from alone inworking within it,speaks to the ambitions of a loose network of experimental filmmakers whose work has been given the equally loose critical moniker "structural film."9 a Hollis Frampton, key filmmaker within this burgeoning counter-cinema, described the movement as one to reconsider and recover an entire history of film that had become mistakenly bound to that of the photograph.10 That is, they sought to start again where filmmakers of the 1920s, like Hans Richter, Oskar Fischinger, and Viking Eggeling had leftoff, when advanced painters and sculptors looked to film for the most progressive 7. Word Movie/Flux Film (1966) and Razorblades (1965-1968) a also employ flicker effect but without the mandalic structure. 8. Victor Grauer's Archangel and John Cavanaugh's Blink, two other flicker films, were also made in 1966. 9. The term "structural" has at least three separate meanings, which are often confused. P. Adams Sitney coined the term "structural film" in 1969, referring to works wherein "the shape of the whole film is predetermined and simplified, and it is that shape that is the primal impression of the film." Peter Gidal's use of the term "structuralist/ materialist film" refers to those works that dialectically engage the in renounce viewer order to the illusion of commercial film. Finally, structural in relation to Sharits's work tends to have a third meaning an associated with analytical approach to film derived from Claude Levi-Strauss's structural anthropology. a 10. H. Frampton, "For Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes in and Hypotheses," Circles of Confusion: Film, Photography, Video, 1. Paul 1968. Film stills. Figure Sharits,N:0:T:H:l:N:G, Texts, 1968-1980 (Rochester, N.Y.: Visual Studies Workshop Press, Reproduced with permission from the Paul Sharits Estate. 1983), pp. 110-111. This content downloaded from 165.123.34.86 on Tue, 14 May 2013 13:39:25 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Smith:A concrete experience of nothing 281 in the arts.11 mean . developments visual This would them through acts of honing down the materials film to purging from everything that tied it industrial involved and often through revealing the process of ... entertainment, including the basic function that had making the locus of attention returns to thework most been associated with the medium historically: as such, as object and as art."17Cornwell cited Sharits's the representation of naturalistic motion. Itwould also flicker films as manifestations of this shift away from mean using film to interrogate the medium itselfwith the illusionistic representation and towards a consideration in critical rigor evident postwar painting and sculpture. of film as an object. as Just Frank Stella explored formal tautology with his Framing cinema in these terms, however, also meant or striped paintings Jasper Johns approached conceptual stretching modernist ideals to encapsulate not only tautology with his maps and targets, Sharits argued that an object, but a mechanical process as well. In order his films could sustain themselves by making reference to represent motion, a film stripmust be divided into to the of itself.12 are only process filmmaking individual frames that exposed to light serially in the the late 1960s and itwas camera Throughout early 1970s, and then projected back. No matter the rate of common for critics to discuss Sharits's and work, projection, the division between the frames will always structural cinema in as a continuation a general, of produce mild, even imperceptible flicker.When made the developments in painting and sculpture that had visible, thisslight delay might be considereda mistake emphasized self-description. By the early 1970s many or an intrusion into the illusion of cinematic motion. of the critics interested inAmerican avant-garde film, Through the dissonant juxtaposition of monochromatic like of the filmmakers many themselves, including frames, however, Sharits's films emphasize these came from fine art than Sharits, rather film-specific "mistakes," positioning them at the center of a self backgrounds.13 Clement Greenberg, as much as any referential cinema.