Last spring, Greene Naftali exhibited filmmaker Paul Sharits’s Shutter Interface (1975, four-screen 16-mm loop projection with four separate sound tracks) alongside a series of drawings, including preparatory sketches for the work; rarely shown during the artist’s lifetime, the piece was restored as a collaborative effort between the gallery and Anthology Film Archives. In her review of the show, Frieze writer Kristen Jones characterized Sharits’s work as “an endlessly prolonged execution of cinematic illusion by firing squad.” Aptly put, I think, for this piece in particular, which was exceptionally trying on the senses. Grating, but gloriously so.
Fast forward less than a year: To Save and Project: The Eighth MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation runs from today through November 14th. On Saturday, October 23rd (full details) Anthology Film Archives Archivist Andrew Lampert and Jay Sanders, a curator, writer, and gallery director of Greene Naftali will present some of Sharits’s lesser-known films, including his earliest surviving work, Wintercourse (1962) as part of AFA’s continued preservation efforts. Given Sharits’s penchant for film-as-gallery-installation, I’ll be interested to see these pieces screened at MoMA. Here’s to hoping a proper theater doesn’t suck the scrap out of them.
