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100 Greatest Animated Shorts / Film #3: Interwoven / Harry Smith

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USA / 1947-1949

My favourite abstract animated films have to be Harry Smith’s Early Abstractions, especially Film #3: Interwoven. I like the films because they are beautiful, unique and intricate, because each one of the thousands of frames could be hung on the wall of a gallery and not least because of the incredible Harry Smith himself and his amazing life story. At times this may read like a fantastical beatnik parody, but if you check the date you will see its no longer April 1st and I’m not making this up. Smith seems to be a bit unappreciated in the mainstream, so apologies if this article is a bit on the long side but otherwise it’s difficult to do him justice.

Harry Smith’s early films, known as Films #1-5 , 7 and 10 or Early Abstractions (or “the batiked films” as Smith was later to refer to them) were mainly made with Smith’s own elaborate technique of painting directly onto 35mm film, using a batik-like technique utilising stencils, tape, cutouts and layers of paint, dyes, ink and petroleum jelly. These amazing works were similar to Len Lye’s expressionist films but incorporating mystical elements of Native American art and encoded alchemical imagery. The films were re-edited, reprojected, and refilmed countless times resulting in work of great density and complexity.

All of Smith’s films seemed to be in a state of permanent reworking and re-editing through most of his life, and are therefore quite difficult to date. A film shown at a festival in 1947 may be very different from the version that is viewed today for example, and Smith did not seem unduly concerned with the conventions of giving his films “official” titles, dates and running times.

Harry Smith was, among other things, an enigmatic animator, painter, bohemian and magician, plus a curator of Native American culture and early American folk and pop music. In fact, producing major works in different disciplines (and having a common name) has meant that people reading about Harry Smith’s paintings may have no idea he is also the animator Harry Smith, or that he is the same Harry Smith who curated seminal compilations of rare folk music. Described by Kenneth Anger as “The Worlds Greatest Magician”, this was apparently another of his talents; Smith was said to have helped many people (such as Oskar Fischinger’s wife) with his spells, for instance. His frequent use of bizarre occult magic included leaving containers of his semen in the auditorium of his screenings to “absorb audience energy”. His incredible personal collections of objects included 30,000 Ukrainian Easter eggs and thousands of paper planes found randomly on the streets.

Harry Smith’s life story has been so mythologised, not least by Smith himself, that it’s hard to get a grip on the truth. His family were highly unconventional and encouraged his interest in philosophy, alternative religion and the occult. Smith claimed his father gave him a blacksmith shop when he was twelve and told him to try and convert lead into gold. As a teenager he would often sleep at the Indian reservation where his mother worked as a teacher and make recordings of Native American music and rituals. The story goes that Smith dropped out of college in 1944 after smoking grass and attending a Woodie Guthrie concert, moved to San Francisco for a bohemian lifestyle and never looked back.

Contrary to popular belief, however, “bohemian” isn’t necessarily a byword for inactivity. Not only having produced some of the twentieth century’s most remarkable abstract animation and being credited as a big influence in 1960s psychedelia, Smith is also famous for archiving and putting together one of the most important collections of folk and outsider music which, in its released form, became a huge influence on future musicians like Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin. Similar to Len Lye in that he drew on his childhood connection with “primitive” American Indian art, Smith also associated with, and was influenced by, California-based artists including the great avant-garde pioneer Oskar Fischinger, an émigré from pre-war Germany.

Although said to be generous with what little money he had, Smith by his own choice lived for much of his life “as a bum” with no income, relying on benefactors and scrounging bits of money here and there which he would invariably spend on books, music, alcohol or other recreational substances rather than conventional necessities like food or rent. In short Smith was a maverick free spirit and his unique, freeform and often mesmerizing animation is as uncategorisable as the man himself.

While in San Francisco Smith studying painting he teamed with and fellow student Jordan Belson to organise some film screenings called Art in Cinema, which aimed to show all the greatest abstract and avant-garde films made to date. Smith traveled to Los Angeles to ask Oskar Fischinger and other avant-garde pioneers like John and James Whitney to be involved. Inspired by the brilliant Fischinger and also the films of Len Lye and Norman McLaren painted directly onto film stock, Smith and Belson began making films of their own. Having no equipment or money, Smith was helped by photographer and experimental film maker Hy Hirsh, using ink given to him by the Whitney brothers.

Smith’s early films were often made as a visual response to the great Jazz artists of the time such as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Chet Baker. Later, Smith would screen this work in the nightclubs of San Francisco where these same musicians would in return create their music in response to the films. Smith’s working methods, enhanced by various intoxicants, are said to have been a form of Synesthesia, the phenomenon of overlapping senses, such as seeing sounds as colours and of images triggering internal sensations of sound.

Harry Smith’s most famous work came in 1960, the mysterious spiritual cut out epic Film #12 (or, as named by fellow abstract film-maker and friend Jonas Mekas, Heaven and Earth Magic). The film seems to have been made between 1950 and 1960. During this process Smith often used sleep deprivation as a gateway to spirituality and the subconscious, a process of falling asleep, awaking and resuming work continuously next to his camera. In Smith’s words this was “to make the whole thing automatic…some kind of universal process was directing these so-called arbitrary processes”. Smith gave a typically mysterious summary of the narrative as follows: “The first part depicts the heroine’s toothache consequent to the loss of a very valuable watermelon, her dentistry and transportation to heaven. Next follows an elaborate exposition of the heavenly land, in terms of Israel and Montreal. The second part depicts the return to Earth from being eaten by Max Müller on the day Edward VII dedicated the Great Sewer of London.”

According to Smith, the original of Heaven and Earth Magic was made on on 35mm film with a running time of six hours, although if this version existed it now seems lost. What survives is an hour-long 16mm edit, in which for long periods small cutout figures, white against black, jerkily manipulate a variety of cutout or real symbolic objects. If the visuals in this disappoint compared to the richness of Smith’s early work, what should be remembered is that the film was designed to be enhanced with colour filters, lights, music and sound effects manipulated by Smith along with framing masks that transformed the screen itself to appropriate symbolic shapes. This would give the overall feel of an elaborate Victorian magic lantern theatre embellishing an animated shadow play. Also integrated into many of its legendary screenings was a whole other theatre of activity with Smith often letting off fireworks, giving a running “stream of consciousness” commentary, while fending off hecklers and scorning members of the audience who weren’t sufficiently appreciative.

After this Smith would spend years developing a variety of even more ambitious film projects. Spending much of the 1960s trying to complete his unique mystical animated version of The Wizard of Oz entitled Film #13: Oz aka The Magic Mushroom People of Oz, Smith at first raised a budget (he later claimed to be a million and a half dollars) from a group of patrons and set up a large expensive film studio with a huge elaborate animation stand. After a year Smith had produced only nine minutes of usable film and when in 1962 one of the main financiers died of a drugs overdose, the others pulled the plug. Smith was locked out of the studio and most of the work was destroyed. What remains was edited with other material to form subsequent films. The first part of Film #16: Oz  – The Tin Woodsman’s Dream for instance shows glimpses of the stunning film that never was.

Film #18: Mahogony took Smith another ten years and was based on the start of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil’s opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny. Smith took Manhattan as his version of the “Mahogony City” in the story, a parable in which “everything is permitted and poverty is the only sin”. Smith intended to create a new film language that would be equally understandable to all people on earth, by using his visual symbols to connect to a collective, spiritual subconscious. He used live-action and animation and filmed many scenes in The Chelsea Hotel where he lived, featuring friends like Allen Ginsberg, Jonas Mekas and Patti Smith as well as the random homeless people he befriended, as they came to visit.

In 1992 Harry Smith died of cardiac arrest in this legendary hotel, singing in his friend Paola Igliori’s arms. Poet and writer Igliori later made American Magus (2001), a documentary about Smith’s life. Smith was certainly one of the most legendary counter-cultural figures of the twentieth century and, if fellow abstract animator, artist and adventurer Len Lye was once said to be “the worlds least boring man”, then Smith must have run him a very close second.

Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is an list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. Click here to see all of the picks of the list so far. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome!

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