Thus Paul Sharits's stroboscopic flicker film "Epileptic Seizure Comparison" (1976) appears near images of what in psychiatry have been dubbed "influencing machines, " mechanical objects that some schizophrenics imagine control their thoughts and actions.
Were it not for his belief in a nonnarrative cinema, some American film and video artists, even those who were not his students Paul Sharits and Stephen Beck, to name only two might have had different careers.