Spectrum Analysis: Discussing the Films of Paul Sharits with Bill Brand, Chris Hughes, John Klacsmann, and Andrew Lampert

FEDERICO WINDHAUSEN

In 1994, a year after the death of Paul Sharits, the distributors of his films received a letter from Jonas Mekas informing them that Sharits’s films (see Plate 13 for an example of one such film) had been entrusted to Anthology Film Archives.¹ Noting the lack of internegatives for many of the films, Mekas put forward the optimistic notion that “for a few years” the rental revenue they generated would fund the creation of preservation materials. But the next ten years saw few Sharits preservation projects, with one notable exception being the Whitney Museum of American Art’s attempt at reconstructing the film installation Shutter Interface (1975) for its 2001 exhibition Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964–1977. The situation changed around 2004–5, when museums and galleries in Europe and the United States began to fund the preservation of Sharits’s theatrical and gallery-based films. Working with laboratories such as Cineric and Colorlab, among others, Andrew Lampert and John Klacsmann at Anthology and Bill Brand of BB Optics have sought to restore and renew a body of work in film that has long been recognized for its exploration of the possibilities of monochromatic and hybrid colors. They joined me in a conversation in New York City on June 5, 2014, along with Chris Hughes of Colorlab, who participated via internet.

andrew lampert:

The ideal for any preservation is that you would have a perfect-condition color original, whether that’s a negative or a positive, as it came out of the camera, as it was edited. Presumably, if it were perfect, that means the color would be intact, the splices would be good, it wouldn’t be shrunken, no broken perforations, not scratched—and this was just not the case with Sharits. He has such a diverse amount of work in terms of methods of production. One of the things we always talk about in the preservation of experimental film is that sometimes you have to follow the route of the filmmaker to figure out a process by which the film was made. In many cases you have to duplicate that.

john klacsmann:

You have to take experimental approaches to preserve experimental film.

al:

With Sharits, so many of the processes that he took were reversal based, meaning he shot reversal, made reversal masters, and used those as, let’s call them, positive negatives (to produce positives from positives). He was also, with certain titles, intentionally scratching them. So there is a lot to consider. The biggest problem with Sharits is not necessarily locating the originals. In many cases, they’re here or they have been identified. It is that he was making some of his most thoughtful and intense color work in a period when the stocks he was using were the most prone to fade quickly. One stock in particular that he (and many artists in the 1970s) used was called “ECO,” Eastman Commercial Original 7252. It’s an intermediate, 16mm positive stock that has often turned purple. It has been said that this happened within a couple of years of shooting with the stock.

bill brand:

The good news about 7252 ECO is that it was a low-contrast stock that was specifically designed to be printed on Kodachrome. Most reversal stocks were not used to make prints. They were projection contrast in the original, used for TV news or home movies. But ECO was considered a professional stock. It was low contrast and meant to go on to Kodachrome print stock, and Kodachrome is really stable. Some of the Sharits films that were shot on Ektachrome/ECO were Kodachrome prints. The print is often a better element for preserving, but also the most reliable reference.

al:

In order to identify the best source for reproduction, we had to do an analysis of not only the materials here but at other places, recalling prints from distributors, contacting museums and collections. Because a print—very often for his mid-seventies works more so than anything else—is...