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NFR Project: ‘Early Abstractions: #1-5, 7, 10’
(1939-1956)
Created by Harry Smith
Premiere: various
23 min.
Harry Smith (1923-1991) was a genius. He is best known today for compiling the famous 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, which influenced countless musicians and listeners, and helped to fuel the folk boom of the early 1960s.
Smith himself swung wildly from obsession to obsession. He studied anthropology and the occult. He painted pictures, many of them lost or destroyed; he pioneered the use of psychotropic drugs. He was a mystic and a self-styled shaman.
His films were always works in progress. He was decades ahead of his time in that he created abstract animations, some painted directly on the film stock, others utilizing a cut-and-paste, stop-motion technique. His innovations inspired filmmakers as diverse as Stan Brakhage and Terry Gilliam.
The fruits of his painstaking labors are fascinating. They are a rush of changing shapes and colors, culminating in the kaleidoscope effects of Variation #10, which features mandalas, sephiras (kabalistic “trees of life”), spirals, cascades of tarot cards, and demonic and Buddhist symbols.
Smith, in his own inimitable way, describes his output below.
Per EM Arts --
“My cinematic excreta is of four varieties: - batiked abstractions made directly on film between 1939 and 1946, optically printed non-objective studies composed around 1950, semi-realistic animated collages made as part of my alchemical labours of 1957 to 1962, and chronologically superimposed photographs of actualities formed since the latter year. All these works have been organised in specific patterns derived from the interlocking beats of the respiration, the heart and the EEG Alpha component and should be observed together in order, or not at all, for they are valuable works, works that will live forever - they made me gray.
No. 1: Hand-drawn animation of dirty shapes - the history of the geologic period reduced to orgasm length.
No. 2: Batiked animation, etc. etc. The action takes place
either inside the sun or in Zurich, Switzerland.
No. 3: Batiked animation made of dead squares, the most
complex hand-drawn film imaginable.
No. 4: Black-and-white abstractions of dots and grill-works
made in a single night.
No. 5: Color abstraction. Homage to Oscar Fischinger - a
sequel to No. 4.
No. 7: Optically printed Pythagoreanism in four movements
supported on squares, circles, grill-works and triangles with an interlude
concerning an experiment.
No. 10: An exposition of Buddhism and the Kabala in the form
of a collage. The final scene shows Aquatic mushrooms (not in No. 11) growing
on the moon while the Hero and Heroine row by on a cerebrum.”
Harry Smith from Film-makers’ Cooperative Catalogue 3, pp. 57-58
Sitting down to a intensely focused session of viewing his films, it is easy to see the hallucinogenic thrusts of his work, which seeks to overwhelm the visual sense of the viewer and push them into a transcendent state. Nearly a century after their creation, they are still ahead of their time, full of mystery and the excitement of seeing everything with otherworldly eyes.
The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Gone with the Wind.
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