Dismembering Harry Smith

Patron Saint of Truly Independent Film Jonas Mekas continually startled with his archly observed anecdotes, the previously unannounced debut of a brilliant lo-fi video compilation of his own documentary clips of Harry, and the dramatic last-minute announcement of a surprise grant from photographer-filmmaker Robert Frank to start building a Harry Smith annex for Mekas‘ Anthology Film Archives (this generosity, marking the anniversary of daughter Andrea Frank’s 1974 death in a plane crash, moved Mekas visibly, rupturing the chattily decorous proceedings with a moment of silent awkward emotion). P. Adams Sitney‘s bombastic oratorical style gave his utterly convincing demonstration of the dual homages in Smith’s hermetic stop-action clip-art masterpiece Heaven and Earth Magic (1961) -- to Georges Melies (French pioneer of fantastic special-effects films) and contemporary psychoanalytic theory -- an appropriately Barnumesque frisson. Still, after devoting thankless years to establishing the cultural centrality of Smith‘s films (while watching the artist himself spend decades in drug-addled poverty), the film buffs have found themselves overtaken by a tide of academic and popular interest in a project Smith abandoned in the early ’50s.

Though already a key figure in a flourishing scene, Smith left the West Coast in 1951 for what appeared to be the greener pastures of Manhattan and the patronage a of Baroness Hilla Rebay of the Guggenheim. Soon strapped for cash, Smith approached Folkways Records founder Moses Asch, offering to sell him the vast collection of 78s he‘d been accumulating for over a decade. Asch obliged, but also suggested Harry assemble a series of LP records that Folkways could release. The resulting six-record Anthology of American Folk Music went on to occupy a fulcral point in the folk-music revival, tipping the balance away from the antiseptic vanillafications of the Kingston Trio et al. and toward what Bob Dylan characterized as “traditional music . . . based on hexagrams. It comes about from legends, Bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death.”

In spite of its universal citation as a depth charge of stylistic influence on 20th-century popular music, Smith considered the Anthology primarily as a tool for a sort of occult ritual invocation. Breaking the volumes down into an elemental quatrain of Earth, Water, Fire and Air (the fourth volume finding release only last year on the late John Fahey’s Revenant label), arranging and annotating his selections in a kabalistically idiosyncratic way and controlling every aspect of the package design, Smith meticulously orchestrated the most widely distributed example of his quixotic organizational skills. “I felt social change would result from it,” he later said. At face value, this may refer to the not-inconsiderable effect of turning a generation‘s attention to a lost body of exquisitely wrought testimony to the racism and poverty underlying the American Dream. Some commentators attribute the entire range of social upheavals that marked the second half of the 20th century to Smith’s magic.

The most archetypally resonant outcome is Dylan himself, his messianic role in the counterculture suggesting the possession of some hapless son of a Minnesota furniture dealer by the daemonic entity conjured from Smith‘s alchemical machinations. Okay, maybe not. But one of the great joys of Smith’s complex and disparate oeuvre is that, whatever your point of entry, you‘re inexorably drawn into the artist’s nonlinear way of thinking, suckered into searching for hidden correlations between seemingly discrete phenomena before you can whisper “paranoid.” Still, as Notre Dame English professor Stephen Fredman observed in one of the most syncretic assessments of Smith‘s work presented, “Smith’s art proposes not to excite admiration or to appeal to notions of taste, but rather to be efficacious, to make something happen. In that sense, the work is purely iconic rather than expressive: It doesn‘t make a statement -- whether in the form of artistic commentary or political commitment or personal revelation -- but rather invites participation.”

Smith became a fixture on the NYC psychedelic boho scene, continuing to produce fragments of increasingly ambitious film projects, while his Heaven and Earth Magic found favor among the hippies and with young animator Terry Gilliam. Smith recorded The Fugs’ first LP, Allen Ginsberg‘s songwriting debut, Peyote Ceremonies of the Kiowa, and countless cassettes filled with his massive unreleased soundscape project Materials for the Study of Religion and Culture in the Lower East Side, all while living in a cramped (usually Chelsea) hotel room with collections of rare books, records, Ukrainian Easter eggs, Mayan codices, Seminole patchwork dresses, tarot cards, mounted string figures (about which he composed a several-thousand-page treatise), and found paper airplanes.

Except for the paper airplanes, which were acquired by the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, most of these valuable and carefully assembled curations were traded for food, shelter and medicine in the last decade of Smith’s dissolute life. What remains is preserved thanks to the Anthology Film Archives and Rani Singh, who became Smith‘s assistant during his latter-day stint as shaman-in-residence at the Naropa Institute in Boulder. Singh, director of the Harry Smith Archives, is one of this year’s Getty scholars. Her presence in L.A., along with the arrival of both former Folkways director (and supervisor of the Anthology reissue) Anthony Seeger and David Sefton (Willner‘s enabler in an earlier London version of the “Harry Smith Project”) at UCLA, are just a few of many fortuitous coincidences that made the conference possible.