"To be an
animator requires a methodical and systematic mind, diligence and meticulous
attention to detail, and the patience and sheer stamina to withstand long-haul,
labour-intensive and hideously fiddly
work. Harry Smith was unusually endowed with these qualities. Although best
known for his work as a collector of obscure folk and blues 78 rpm recordings
(resulting in 1952’s epochal and hugely influential six-LP compilation The
Anthology of American Folk Music), McLaren’s true passion was animation.
"Using
various self-developed techniques of hand-painting and marking the film using
masking tape, working with scratch-board
drawings, and cut-out images, Smith would spend years holed up in his New York
apartment toiling over a single film.
His animations often reached several hours in length and required
drastic editing down before he could show them.
Many projects were abandoned in an unfinished state. On their rare
public performances, Smith would project the films onto special painted screens
of his own construction. Music – usually jazz
– was central to his work, as with the original version of Thelonious
Monk’s “Misterioso” that soundtracks “Mirror Animations”.
"Like his
hour-long masterpiece “Heaven and Earth Magic”, “Mirror Animations” (1956-57) emerged out of Smith’s obsessive collation of illustrative material from 19th
Century catalogues. He filed the
cut-outs – photographs or drawings of people, animals, vegetables, tools,
furniture, and sundry other objects - in
glassine envelopes for protection, while noting on file cards every possible
interaction that a given image could have with another image. Yet, contradicting all this
obsessive-compulsive preparation, when it came to the assembly process, Smith
aimed for a state of mental vacancy akin to automatic writing.
"The
deliberately stilted movements of the snipped-out images have a quaint and
creaky quality that casts back to the magic lanterns of the 17th
Century. Magic of a different kind – not conjuring tricks and illusions, but
the occult and hermetic knowledge – suffuses Smith’s work. Some of the imagery
in “Mirror Animations” looks like it’s plucked straight off a set of Tarot
cards. No wonder film-maker and critic
Jonas Mekas celebrated “the magic cinema of Harry Smith” while avant-jazzman
John Zorn hailed him as a “Mystical Animator”." - SR
".... An eccentric polymath. He painted, made experimental films, practiced occult alchemy (he was ordained in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, a spiritual group affiliated with the magician and self-appointed prophet Aleister Crowley), and believed that the careful accumulation and ordering of things could bring about new knowledge.... Smith collected all sorts of stuff: paper airplanes, Ukrainian Easter eggs, figures he made by looping or weaving lengths of string, anything shaped like a hamburger, and thousands, if not tens of thousands, of 78-r.p.m. records... Like many serious collectors of arcane but precious objects, Smith could be irascible, mean, and single-minded to the point of psychopathy. There are stories of his thieving, particularly when he believed that an item would be better off in his care. He never married, drank to unconsciousness, went absolutely nuts if anyone talked while he was playing a record, and, according to his friend Allen Ginsberg, kept “several years’ deposits of his semen” in the back of his freezer for “alchemical purposes.' "
- Amanda Petrusich, in The New Yorker, on The Harry Smith B-Sides, a box set of the flipsides of all the 78 rpm tunes that he collected on The Anthology of Folk Music.
Confession: I have owned the reissue of The Anthology for a couple of decades now, but only ever got round to playing one of the discs. When I did, I unawares miscued the CD-player controls - as a result, one particular Dock Boggs song played over and over for about 35 minutes. It took me quite a while to notice - about 20 minutes in, I was like "wow this is intense, this endless incantatory folksong saga, verse after verse!". Eventually I twigged what had happened.
Never went back to the set - never seemed like the right time, always something more pressing in the present, or a corner of the past that seemed more compelling. Perhaps it's finally time - indeed the box is sitting reproachfully near the front of the records by the stereo. Should definitely listen to first, before getting on to the B-sides...
Harry Smith contact sheet by Allen Ginsberg
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