Piece Mandala/End War, a film by Paul Sharits (1966) Colour, 16mm, 5 mins. 

Created in 1966, Piece Mandala/End War by American artist PAUL SHARITS explores the tension between peace and violence.

Abandoning painting in the mid-Sixties, Paul Sharits created several non-linear films, of which N:O:T:H:I:N:G (1968) and Ray Gun Virus (1966) are perhaps his most intense abstract realisations. Influenced by Eastern philosophy and spiritual practices like many avant-garde filmmakers in the Sixties such as STAN BRAKHAGE, JORDAN BELSON and JOHN WHITNEY, the film continues on Sharits’ exploration around the sacred art form of the mandala.

“Conflict and tension are natural in a yin/yang universe but atomic structure, yab/yum and other dynamic equilibrium systems make more cosmic sense as conflict models than do the destructive orgasms the United States is presently having in Vietnam.”

Sharits was very distrustful of words and left few written accounts of his work – but the texts included here provide an insight into Sharit’s vision of film as a “meditational-visionary experience”.

Text Sophie Pinchetti

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Notes on Films/1966-68 by Paul Sharits

Published in Film Culture 47, Summer 1969, p.13-16. 

[Excerpts]

OVERTURE:

All writing is pigshit. People who leave the obscure and try to define whatever it is that goes on in their heads, are pigs.

– Antonin Artaud

 

GENERAL STATEMENT FOR 4th INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL, KNOKKE-LE ZOUTE:

I am tempted to use this occasion to say nothing at all and simply let my films function as the carriers of themselves – except that this would be perhaps too arrogant and, more important, a good deal of my art does not, in fact, “contain itself.” It is difficult for me to verbalize about “my intentions” not only because the films are non-verbal experiences but because they are structured so as to demand more of viewers than attention and appreciation; that is, these works require a certain fusion of “my intentions” and with the “viewer’s intentions.”

This has nothing to do with “pleasing an audience” – I mean to say that in my cinema flashes of projected light initiate neural transmission as much as they are analogues of such transmission systems and that the human retina is as much a “movie screen” as is the screen proper. At the risk of sounding immodest, by re-examining the basic mechanisms of motion pictures and by making these fundamentals explicitly concrete, I am working toward a completely new conception of cinema. Traditionally, “abstract films,” because they are extensions of the aesthetics and pictorial principles of painting or are simply demonstrations of optics, are no more cinematic than narrative-dramatic films which squeeze literature and theatre onto a two-dimensional screen. I wish to abandon imitation and illusion and enter directly into the higher drama of: celluloid, two-dimensional strips; individual rectangular frames; the nature of sprockets and emulsion; projector operations; the three-dimensional light beam; environmental illumination; the two-dimensional reflective screen surface; the retinal screen; optic nerve and individual psycho-physical subjectivities and consciousness. In this cinematic drama, light is energy rather than a tool for the representation of non-filmic objects, shapes and textures. Given the fact of retinal inertia and the flickering shutter mechanism of film projection, one may generate virtual forms, create actual motion (rather than illustrate it), build actual color-space (rather than picture it), and be involved in actual time (immediate presence).

While my films have thematic structures (such as the sense of striving, leading to mental suicide and death, and then rhythms of rebirth in Ray Gun Virus and the viability of sexual dynamics as an alternative to destructive violence in Piece Mandala End War), they are not at all stories.

I think of my present work as being occasions for meditational-visionary experience.

PIECE MANDALA/END WAR/SYNOPSIS FOR 4th INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL COMPETITION

This work was made for an anthology of films the general theme of which was to be For Life, Against The War; the film was not completed in time to be eligible for inclusion in that anthology and thus stands on its own as a statement of that theme. Piece Mandala is not narrative drama; instead it is meant to provide a short but intense meditative experience. “Meditative” implies suspension of linear time and spatial direction; circularity and simultaneity are basic characteristics of mandalas, the most effective tools for turning perception inward. In this temporal mandala, blank color frequencies space out and optically feed into black and white images of one love-making gesture which is seen simultaneously from both sides of its space and both ends of its time. Color structure is linear-directional but implies a largely infinite cycle; light-energy and image frequencies induce rhythms related to the psychophysical experience of the creative act of cunnilingus. Conflict and tension are natural in a yin/yang universe but atomic structure, yab/yum and other dynamic equilibrium systems make more cosmic sense as conflict models than do the destructive orgasms the United States is presently having in Vietnam.