American Magus: Harry Smith

(1996)

demonstrates how differently Harry Smith appeared to friends from each circle, offering personal recollections that present a multidimensional, largely contradictory picture of the man.

American Magus: Harry Smith, 1st generation

The book American Magus is a work in progress. The editor, Paola Igliori is an Italian from Rome who has become a New Yorker by adoption. A student of art and an artist herself, she knew Harry Smith during the late '80s and was at his side at the moment of his death. She managed to collect some information from him and tried to understand the man and his works. As she wrote in the preface, "This book is only a scratching of the surface. It hopes to be direct, simple traces of Harry, a live map of different points of entrance in the labyrinth. I hope it will be a pathfinder for other more in-depth works."

The book opens with two essays, one by musician, computer designer and writer Bill Breeze, and another by the aforementioned Singh. They have the function of creating a minimum of order and information on the subject which the reader must then pursue through drawings, photographs, reproductions, manuscripts, interviews with curators and friends and colleagues of the artist, and documents of various kinds, ending with a list of the innumerable and chaotic objects left by the deceased. Among the interviews I would recommend that with Jordan Belson, another solitary and retiring genius of non-objective animation who evokes the period from 1946 to the early 1950s when he and Smith were coming of age in Berkeley and San Francisco; that of Jonas Mekas, New York guru of the avant-garde cinema, who was close to Harry during the early 1960s and beyond; that of Rosebud, who was the spiritual wife of a man who never showed much interest in sex; and that of the poet Allen Ginsberg.

One hopes that in the near future scholars will succeed, slowly and methodically, in putting in order, dating and numbering the rest of the works of Harry Smith, and will hopefully recover at least a portion of the lost materials. That would be good, but in any case this American Magus certainly preserves for us, at least in part, the anarchy, volcanic freedom, and lightning of this alien with the superior mind that never once considered the possibility of following some current trend.

(Translated from Italian by William Moritz)

Source: Animation World Magazine

ISBN-10: 0962511994

ISBN-13: 978-0962511998

American Magus: Harry Smith, 1st generationAmerican Magus: Harry Smith, 1st generation

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Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film 1910-1975 (1979) is a catalogue of an exhibition held at the Hayward Gallery in London from 3 May until 17 June 1979 on rare, essential and controversial avant-garde film history.

Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900 (2005) traces the history of a revolutionary idea: that fine art should attain the abstract purity of music. Over the past one hundred years some of the most adventurous modern and contemporary artists have explored unorthodox means to invent a kinetic, non-representational art modeled upon pure instrumental music. (Amazon)

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Harry Everett Smith (1923-1991) was an American archivist, ethnomusicologist, student of anthropology, record collector, experimental filmmaker, artist, bohemian and mystic. Harry Smith is a well-known figure in several fields. People who know him as a filmmaker often do not know of his 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, while folk music enthusiasts often do not know he was "the greatest living magician" according to Kenneth Anger. (Wikipedia)

No. 4: Fast Track (1947) by Harry Smith. In No. 4, the influence of Oskar Fischinger on Smith's work becomes more marked. The film works with a black background and white shapes. It begins with two small circles dancing in tandem across the screen, as well as decreasing and increasing in size to give an impression of depth. These are joined, via superimposition, by two simple grilles, and then by a larger grille which swishes from left to right and vice versa at such a speed to produced a blurred effect. (Senses of Cinema)

No. 5: Circular Tensions (1950) - Homage to Oskar Fischinger by Harry Smith begins with a static red triangle, then a green square, and then a red circle. It is as though we are being introduced to the protagonists of the film: simple, static shapes out of which complexity and rhythmic interaction will be produced. The film also bombards the viewer with a number of alternating colour transitions used in conjunction with shapes that emerge from deep screen space. (Senses of Cinema)

Symphonie Diagonale (1924) - original title: Symphonie Diagonale. In Diagonal Symphony by Viking Eggeling, the emphasis is on objectively analyzed movement rather than expressiveness on the surface patterning of lines into clearly defined movements, controlled by a mechanical, almost metronomic tempo. (Standish Lawder: "Structuralism and Movement in Experimental Film and Modern Art, l896-192l", doctoral dissertation)

Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1994) by French critic and composer Michel Chion reassesses audiovisual media since the revolutionary 1927 debut of recorded sound in cinema, shedding crucial light on the mutual relationship between sound and image in audiovisual perception. (Colombia University Press)

Study No. 8 (1931) - original title: Studie Nr. 8 by Oskar Fischinger. He "did not have enough money to buy the rights for the second half of Paul Dukas' The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Despite the lack of the finished ending of the music, this study remains the most complex, most stunning, and for the artist the favorite and most important of the black and white films." (Dr. William Moritz, Canyon Cinema)

Optical Poetry (2004) by Dr. William Moritz is the long-awaited, definitive biography of Oskar Fischinger. The result of over 30 years of research on this visionary abstract filmmaker and painter. In addition to Moritz's comprehensive biography, it includes numerous photographs in colour and black and white (many never before published), statements by Oskar Fischinger about his films, a newly created extensive filmography, and a selected bibliography. (John Libbey Publishing)

Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967) was a German abstract animator, filmmaker, and painter. He made over 50 short animated films, and painted c. 800 canvases, many of which are in museums, galleries and collections worldwide. (Wikipedia)

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American Magus: Harry Smith

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