This weekend, I’ll have the immense pleasure of seeing Harry Smith’s magnum opus (and final film), Mahagonny, at the NW Film Forum, here in Seattle. (The title, it turns out, is pronounced “maha-GO-nee” — and should not be confused with “mahogany,” which is a hardwood species of tree and the title of a completely different film released in 1975 starring Dianna Ross and having nothing even remotely to do with Harry Smith.)

The film was shown only six times in 1980 (the year of its completion) and, from what I can tell, only three or four since then, making this something of a landmark event — especially for someone like me, who’s been dying to see it for more than 20 years, ever since I first read about it as a teenager in P. Adams Sitney’s wonderful book, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-1978 (2nd edition, when the film was still in production) and very few elsewheres.

The film — shot from 1970 – 1972 and then obsessively edited over the next eight years — was originally comprised of four 16mm films projected simultaneously (see image at right).  Circa 2001 – 2002, the nearly 2 1/2 hour work was composited to a single 35mm element, with the four images tiled as originally intended. The preservation was undertaken by the Anthology Film Archives and The Harry Smith Archives in NYC.

FolkStreams.net offers a fine 10 minute documentary, Restoring Harry Smith’s Mahagonny (in MP4 and Real formats), that details the restoration process — in particular the considerable research that went into the effort.

Smith’s Mahagonny is based on an opera by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, 1930), which comprises the soundtrack. Smith described it as being, in part, a mathematical analysis of Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass. As further explained on the Getty Trust’s web site, “The Weill opera is transformed into a numerological and symbolic system. Images in the film are divided into the categories portraits, animation, symbols, and nature to form the palindrome P.A.S.A.N.A.S.A.P. ” This is, of course, exactly the sort of thing we’d expect of ol’ Harry, goddess rest his soul.

As Smith archivist Rani Singh explained in program notes written for a May, 2002 screening of Mahagonny at The Getty Center in Los Angeles:

Much of the action takes place within the Chelsea Hotel. The film contains invaluable portraits of important avantgarde 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….

The editing of Mahagonny was a byzantine process. Smith created index cards for each scene and organized them according to various mathematical permutations in relation to the opera. Twenty-four scenes appear on each reel, following the order of the palindrome. Smith determined the length of each scene by taking into account certain constants in the viewer such as respiration and heartbeat. To synchronize the four reels with the operatic score, he made scrolls representing each edited reel plus a fifth scroll with the time code and list of scenes from the opera.

Jonas Mekas, himself a legendary experimental filmmaker, recalled the original 1980 screenings in an interview published in the absolutely phenomenal book, American Magus: Harry Smith, A Modern Alchemist (Inanout Press, 1996):

“You know, it’s a four-screen/four-projector piece, it’s very complicated. Also it involves — he was always there, he had to do it himself — slides and color gels and all kinds of things going [in front of the lenses]. There was a psychiatrist and doctor named Dr. Gross…who took care of him… Gross had to be a saint to cope with Harry. …But that was the period when he had an argument with Dr. Gross and told Dr. Gross never to come to see his shows. And there comes Dr. Gross. He said, ‘What are you doing here! — You can’t @#!!^!*!#!’ [sic] He had a fight then, he ran upstairs. He [Harry] grabbed all the gels. …He threw them into the street — broke them. I have them all. I collected later in the street and I put them in a box and we still have them, and that was the end of the show.”

Allen Ginsberg, a friend and sometimes-patron of Smith’s, also recalls the film in his own interview later in the same book:

“He made some frames through which the film would be shot and/or projected on screen. So he had these very beautiful Moorish or Greek outlines — comedic or tragic masks — Baroque theater proscenium. He built a machine which would coordinate four projectors at once shooting through these various frames — custom-made frames — proscenium-like theater squares. So there would be four cameras [sic] projected simultaneously with the images coming at random, and I think once by hand. He broke glass plates of the frames in anger — in a tantrum… They’ve been reconstructed — some of them. There were some paper cutouts — cardboard cutouts of the frames that are left. They are in the archives.”

Several of Smith’s other films are showing at the NW Film Forum this weekend, including the stunning animation work Heaven and Earth Magic and several of his short abstract films. These have limited availability on VHS video and, believe me, seeing them projected as film is a whole other world of wonder.

While Harry Smith is recognized as a true and worthy pioneer of experimental film, this only scratches the surface of his complex intellect and legacy. Today, he is perhaps best known as the creator of the Anthology of American Folk Music, a landmark three-volume, six-record compilation album released by Folkways that is credited by those who would know best as being the primary catalyst for the ’60s folk revival. (The Anthology was re-released as a beautiful 3-CD set in 1997, followed by a faithful reconstruction of the unreleased fourth volume, produced by Revenant Records in 2000.)

Smith was also a prodigeous painter and visual artist; an “amateur” ethnographer who played a key role (beginning in his pre-teen years) in documenting and preserving the Native American culture of the Pacific Northwest; was in all likelihood the first white person to participate in and document the peyote rituals of the Kiowa Indians in the US Southwest; gathered the largest collections ever of Ukrainian decorative eggs as well as string figures from cultures all over the world; and was a deeply learned alchemist and occultist who at one time literally rivalled Aleister Crowley for primacy in the OTO. (Indeed, by his own account, the Anthology of American Folk Music was designed as a kind of sonic magickal spell.) And even all that only begins to describe the outer boundaries of his genius. As deeply troubled as he was brilliant, Harry Smith is a wholly unique figure in the history of art and the humanities…and someone we would all do well to learn from. (Though maybe without the cataclysmic drinking bouts.)

Some more Harry Smith links of note:

Mirror Men — a 2002 review of Mahagonny in the Village Voice by J. Hoberman

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: Unearthing the Harry Smith Archives by Rani Singh

Alchemical Transformations: The Abstract Films of Harry Smith by Jamie Sexton

Harry Smith: The Avant Garde in the American Vernacular at the Getty Research Institute

Pete Stampfel, John Fahey and Allen Ginsberg on Harry Smith at Perfect Sound Forever

Wikipedia: Harry Everett Smith

Unfortunately, American Magus is out of print, which is a real shame. I just did a little quick trolling and was stunned to discover the cheapest used copy I could find (of the very few out there) is selling for $153. That amount may be pushing things (depending on your preference), but the book really is far and away the best and most comprehensive [sic] document of Smith and his many life works I have ever heard of, let alone encountered. If should you ever run across it for what, to you, is a reasonable amount, grab it.