Presses du réel publishes reference work on Paul Sharits

Éditions Les Presses du réel has released a comprehensive reference book on Paul Sharits, a seminal figure in American structural film who died in 1993. Edited by Yann Beauvais, the volume fills a gap in scholarship on the artist. From 1966, Sharits made film his programmatic material, deconstructing cinematic apparatus and movement-image by focusing on photograms. Like a composer, he wrote scores for films built frame by frame, creating new syntagms characterized by luminous instability from rapid image succession (flicker films). Early works like Ray Gun Virus and T:o:u:c:h:i:n:g inserted disturbing imagery—mutilation, surgery, sex—into monochromatic structures. He later concentrated on cinema's microstructure: frame, scratch, perforation, grain, projection. Sharits described his cinema as "the temporary assassination of the spectator's normative consciousness," an art at the intersection of structuralism and phenomenology. In the 1970s, he expanded cinematic projection through double and triple projections, inverted images, and image walls, notably at his 1976 retrospective at Albright-Knox Art Gallery, laying groundwork for what would later be called cinema d'exposition. The book includes contributions by Jean-Michel Bouhours.