Word Movie (Fluxfilm 29)
(1966)is a 4-minute silent short film by Paul Sharits. Approximately 50 words visually repeated in varying sequential and positioned relationships, each frame being a different word or word fragment.
Paul Sharits describes his shortest film, the 3 3/4 minute Word Movie/Flux Film 29 in Film Makers’ Cooperative Catalog No. 5: "…approximately 50 words visually repeated in varying sequential and positional relationships/spoken word sound track/structurally, each frame being a different word or word fragment…" As a brief example, the letter c remains positionally fixed in the frame, serving as structure for each different word frame, as with:
Splice
Screen
Space
Incision
And so on, shifting from one letter cycle to another in this fashion throughout the film. A two-colour flicker system, alternating one colour per frame, back and forth through a letter cycle and then changing one or both colours on the nest letter cycle, correlates with the word system.
More than any of Paul Sharits' flicker films, Word Movie most closely literalizes the flicker effect of the shutter mechanism through its use of the separate word for each frame coupled with the single frame units of colour. The word structure as a single unit becomes an analogue for the individual film frame. And at the same time as serving that function, the word emphasizes the screen frame perimeters as certain words are horizontally cut off by the frame line. But the word structure serves in another film analogy, one which is in contrast to the word/frame comparison. Paul Sharits completes the above catalogues description, saying: "…the individual optically-conceptually fuse into one 3 3/4 minute long word," the length of the film. Later at Millennium (December 26, 1970), he contrasted it to the symmetrical mandala films, saying that "Word Movie feels like a straight line going through time."
("Paul Sharits: Illusion and Object" by Regina Cornwell in Artforum Vol. X No. 1, September 1971)
Source: Mike Hoolboom