Harry Smith

Harry Smith’s final film; an epic four-screen projection. Smith worked on this cinematic transformation of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1929) for over ten years and considered it his magnum opus. The film was shot from 1970 to 1972 and edited for the next eight years. The “program” of the film is meticulous, with a complex structure and order. The Weill opera is transformed into a numerological and symbolic system. Images in the film are divided into categories— portraits, animation, symbols and nature— to form the palindrome P.A.S.A.N.A.S.A.P. The film contains invaluable cameos of important avant-garde figures such as Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith, and Jonas Mekas, intercut with installation pieces from Robert Mapplethorpe’s studio, New York City landmarks of the era, and Smith’s visionary animation.

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

Also known as Walden, Jonas Mekas’s first diary film is a six-reel chronicle of his life in 1960s New York, interweaving moments with family, friends, lovers, and artistic idols. Blending everyday encounters with portraits of the avant-garde art scene, it forms an epic, personal meditation on community, creativity, and the passage of time.

The films were made between 1964 and 1966 at Warhol's Factory studio in New York City. Subjects were captured in stark relief by a strong key light, and filmed by Warhol with his stationary 16mm Bolex camera on silent, black and white, 100-foot rolls of film at 24 frames per second. The resulting two-and-a-half-minute film reels were then screened in 'slow motion' at 16 frames per second.

This exhibition focuses on Jonas Mekas’ 365 Day Project, a succession of films and videos in calendar form. Every day as of January 1st, 2007 and for an entire year, as indicated in the title, a large public (the artist's friends, as well as unknowns) were invited to view a diary of short films of various lengths (from one to twenty minutes) on the Internet. A movie was posted each day, adding to the previously posted pieces, resulting altogether in nearly thirty-eight hours of moving images.

16 mm, black & white, silent, 5 min. Untraced collage. Later expanded to No. 12.

16 mm, color, 10 min. Untraced collage.

“Harry Smith visited my apartment on East 3rd Street, New York City, April 1987. Harry told someone calling him he was at “a secret location on the Lower East Side“. So Harry! – Always like that!” He’s seen here recording, while storytelling and giving advice on use of the modern Walkman Pro to Cynthia Poirier (who would soon go on to making brilliant music recordings in West Africa). I like him holding his Walkman Pro up-close (calling it “the modern Walkman” is only referencing back to when it was the best thing available in those days for compact size and convenience).” – Brian Graham

A home movie from 1951 called Autobiography, shot by Belson and Smith in Belson’s North Beach apartment, depicts the classic Beat pad with Smith and Belson’s paintings on the wall, a 16mm projector, and appearances by filmmakers Hy Hirsh and Chris Maclaine and poets Philip Lamantia, Weldon Kees, and Gerd Stern.

Film No. 19 US, 1980, 35mm, 12.5 min.

“Superimposed photographs of Mr. Fleischman’s butcher shop in New York, and the Kiowa around Anadarko, Oklahoma–with Cognate Material. The strip is dark at the beginning and end, light in the middle, and is structured 122333221. I honor it the most of my films, otherwise a not very popular one before 1972. If the exciter lamp blows, play Bert Brecht’s Mahogany.”– Harry Smith

16 mm, color, silent or mono, 1:30 or 20 min. Untraced red-green anaglyph 3-D film.

Roscoe Holcomb was one of America’s greatest banjo players, a musician whose haunting vocal intonations, Old Regular Baptist in tradition, gave Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton the chills and gave John Cohen’s 1963 film High Lonesome Sound its name. Drawing on footage he shot in 1962 and 1974 in Daisy, Kentucky, Cohen made this incredibly moving portrait of Holcomb, for whom the holy spirit always rose up plain and true: “Sometimes, you know, you feel like playing certain songs. I feel like playing the old banjo, I feel like playing some religious songs. I sit down, I feel lonesome. I could play you some of these old religious songs and it just fits me plumb through. Or I could pick up the guitar—the guitar is mostly for the blues. It’s just according to what a man feels, what he’s got on his mind.” His body ravaged by a life in the coal mines and sawmills, Roscoe Holcomb died in 1981 at the age of 68. — Museum of Modern Art

Hand-painted 35 mm stock photographed in 16 mm, color, 3:20 or 10 min. Reportedly cut down from about 30 min. Initially intended to be screened with and synchronized to Dizzy Gillespie's Guarachi Guaro or Manteca. "Batiked animation made of dead squares...".

Early Abstractions is a collection of seven short animated films created by Harry Everett Smith between 1939 and 1956. Each film is between two and six minutes long, and is named according to the chronological order in which it was made. The collection includes Numbers 1–5, 7, and 10.

The Tin Woodman, framed by light bulbs, does a little dance, leaps and retrieves his axe from outside the frame, chops down a tree that turns into various objects, grabs a heart emblem from the corner, and goes to the Emerald City at night with Toto. He goes to the edge of a cliff, where he meats an Asian spirit who gives him a heart shape that becomes a kite that hooks to him with a cane. This is followed by approximately ten minutes of kaleidoscopic images, including a man's hands, a dancing girl, and a cutout of Krishna.

Experimental short. 16 mm, color, silent, 2:30 or 6 min. Sequel to No. 4.

Hand-painted 35 mm stock photographed in 16 mm, color, silent, 2:20 or 5 min. Initially intended to be screened with and synchronized to Dizzy Gillespie's Manteca or Guarachi Guaro. "...the history of the geologic period reduced to orgasm length."

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.

Harry Smith’s screen test by Andy Warhol.