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Films by Harry Smith
Harry Smith, one of the greatest filmmakers of the American avant-garde, was a legendary eccentric: a painter, art collector, amateur anthropologist, and folk-music anthologist whose pioneering animations offer original, mind-altering visions. In his notes Smith recorded the drugs he used while making them, yet his work is incredibly controlled. Early Abstractions (1939-'57), a collection of short, early work, includes batiking and painting on film, techniques that produce incredibly complex fields of shifting shapes and rhythms. The hour-long black-and-white Heaven and Earth Magic, made in the 50s, uses cutout animation to produce a mysterious world of alchemical transformations in which objects suggest a multitude of possibilities. |
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