[Frameworks] Paul Sharits multi-projection question

[Andy Ditzler]

Dear Ekrem,

I rented and showed Shutter Interface to my students last fall, and will do
so again in a few months. In preparation, I talked to some folks who have
also taught the film (hi Jeanne Liotta!) and went looking through all the
Sharits writings I could find for any reference to the difference between
gallery and theater versions, but found very little on this. I have the
same rationale - he made the two-projector version and it remains rentable,
so I rent it and show it. It's a super-accessible work.

A couple of things - the written instructions you get from Film Coop inside
the film can are ambiguous. Use version "A." Version B mentions the effect
of making the two frames slowly merge on screen - but gives no instructions
for how to accomplish this. (Maybe someone here can clarify?) And the
soundtrack needs some extra care, since each projector will have its own
sound. So if you are running it through the house PA, you will need to
configure the channels so it's stereo sound, not mono. I couldn't access
the house PA for this, so my solution was to bring two powered monitor
speakers of my own, and run 1/4" out from each Eiki projector to its
corresponding speaker. More work, but as you know that's what you're
getting into with expanded cinema anyway. By the way, the sound happens
only on the black frames. If you know that as you're watching the work,
it's even cooler.

It's a fantastic projection experience and we all loved it. I left some
room behind the projectors for the students to go and observe the color
frames as they moved through the projector. If you can see that as you
observe the screen, there's no more spectacular lesson in the nature of
film projection (that is, the "conversion" of still frames to "motion").

Andy Ditzler
www.filmlove.org
www.johnq.org
Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, Emory University


On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 1:02 AM, Ekrem Serdar <ekremserdar at gmail.com> wrote:

> Heyya Framers,
>
>   So based on his notes, it seems that many of Paul Sharits'
> multi-projector pieces (Shutter Interface, Dream Displacement, among
> others) are primarily conceived as installations. However, as many of you
> know, there are also "theatrical" versions of these films, using two
> projectors instead of four, and foregoing other alterations to the
> machines. (There's a bunch of these over at Filmmakers Coop.)
>
> The question: Would you say its correct that Sharits made these black box
> versions to simply give the films an expanded (hoho) life, especially
> during a time period when film projection was a rarer sight in galleries?
> So not necessarily the intended version, but a different (and obviously
> more accessible) way to showcase his ideas.
>
> I hear this might be a sensitive subject; but the way I see it is that he
> did make the prints, and as long as it's presented appropriately no
> problem. We'll be showing the two-projector version of Shutter Interface in
> Austin next week (which i had the pleasure of seeing at Hallwalls some
> years back), so just preparing.
>
> --
> ekrem serdar
> austin, tx
>
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