T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, by Paul Sharits, 1968, colour, sound, 12mins, 16mm. 

American avant-garde filmmaker PAUL SHARITS makes a baroque use of flickering colour and psychic flash frames to reveal a hypnotic vision of altered states of consciousness and reality. ‘I think of my present work as being occasions for meditational-visionary experience’ said Sharits of his work. T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, conjures dark and abrasive forces, seeing Sharit’s continous abstract explorations around the transcendental potential of the Tibetan mandala of ‘five Dyani Bouddhas’, refined in a more meditative state in his other film of the same year, N:O:T:H:I:N:G. Never working to please an audience, Sharits’ ambitions for film were to work towards a completely new conception of cinema, abandoning ‘imitation and illusion’ through entering into the higher drama of the celluloid to explore the potential of the human retina as movie screen.

Mandala Films by Paul Sharits is now released by RE:VOIR.

Text by Sophie Pinchetti.