closing night: delcarative mode

"This film, rather than being 'structural' is 'narrative like.' We feel as if we are on some sort of journey, where we never know/predict what is to 'happen' next. It is engaging, like a novel full of surprises”. Thus writes Paul Sharits himself on his 1977 Declarative Mode. The work is both a conclusion and a turning point in Sharits' oeuvre; the last of his "abstract" films, the 16mm double screen projection nevertheless marks a move away from the structuralist ethos of the late 60s and 70s, with a notable turn towards a resurgence of narrative elements. Sharits had conceived Declarative Mode in a multitude of ways: as a locational piece where the film would be projected alongside an exhibition of slide shows of the film’s score along with a display of Frozen Film Frame, channel work of 38 minutes length at 24 frames per second, which was to become a chapter in the longer film that he was planning at the time called Passare and a double projector piece with two identical film prints where one image was to be projected inside the other with the help of a zoom lens. The film was inspired by Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, in particular, a section on anti-slavery that was deleted by the Congress from the final draft. Originally projected with a soundtrack, Sharits would later abandon this auditive element, and have the audience entirely concentrate on the color frames. In a conversation with Alf Bold in the late 1980s he would say, “It’s silent because I want the audience to focus on the rhythm of the colors”. As Arindam Sen writes, Declarative Mode creates a singular sensual experience, where Sharits "has the audience under a spell, by exposing them to, on the one hand, a filmmaking that is rigorously anti-illusionist, and on the other, an experience of intense illusionary perceptual fantasies."

Prints courtesy of Lightcone, Paris.