Harry Smith (l923-91)
Early Abstractions (l946-57), 23 minutes
No. 1: A Strange Dream (l946), 2.5 minutes
No. 2: Message from the Sun (1946-48), 2 minutes
No. 3: Interwoven (1947-49), 3.5 minutes
No. 4: Fast Track (1947), 2 minutes
No. 5: Circular Tensions, Homage to Oskar Fischinger (1950), 2.5 minutes
No. 6: "3-D Film" (1948-51), 1.5 minutes (not included in Early Abstractions)
No. 7: Color Study (1952), 5.5 minutes
No. 8 Unknown
No. 9 Unknown
No. 10: Mirror Animations (1957, 1962-76), 3.5
minutes
No. 11: Mirror Animations (1957), 1962-76), 8
minutes
No. 12: Heaven and Earth Magic Feature (1959- 61), 66 minutes
No. 14: Late Superimpositions (1964), 31 minutes
No. 16: Oz, The Tin Woodmans Dream (1967), 14.5 minutes
No. 18: Mahagonny (1970-80), 141 minutes (4 screens)
(Filmography from American Magus: Harry Smith, Inanout Press)
Harry Smith was born on the west coast and spent his first three decades there. He began making films in the mid-1940s at the same time as he was assisting Frank Stauffacher who was curating the Art in Cinema series at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Stauffacher sent Smith to Los Angeles to visit with the Whitney brothers, Oskar Fischinger, Gregory Markopoulos, and other experimental film-makers, whose work would subsequently appear on screen in San Francisco. These LA artists made an impact on Smith (who would acknowledge Fischinger in Smiths No. 5) but Smith charted his own course into cinema, largely through procedures of painting and printing directly onto film. And while his west coast brethren looked into Eastern philosophy, Smith delved into the Kabbala, surrealism, and alchemy. (RH)
For 30 years Harry Smith worked on these movies, secretly, like an alchemist, and he worked out his own formulas and mixtures to produce these fantastic images. You can watch them for pure color enjoyment; you can watch them for motionHarry Smiths films never stop moving; or you can watch them for hidden and symbolic meanings, alchemic signs. There are more levels in Harry Smiths work than in any other film animator I know. Animated cinemaall those Czechs, and Poles, and Yugoslavs, and Pintoffs, and Bosutovs and Hubleys are nothing but makers of cute cartoons. Harry Smith is the only serious film animator working today. His untitled work on alchemy and the creation of the world will remain one of the masterpieces of the animated cinema. But even his smaller works are marked by the same masterful and never failing sense of movementhe most magic quality of Harry Smiths work.
Jonas Mekas