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For Smith’s first long film, he built a special projector which would change color filters and frames around the image; other slides revealed different borders or changed the screen’s shape, but in classic Smith fashion, he tossed the handmade projector out of a window during an argument, and the film was shown in black and white from then on. Smith’s cut-out readymade animations take center stage in No. 12, the sole figures who are likewise accompanied by “cut-out” sounds that may or may not sync up with the action. This roulette of canned sound effects adds to the film’s resemblance to an elaborately constructed projective psychological test. This was the only time he composed his own soundtrack, and the result vacillates between playful discovery and eerie disassociation. Aside from the Egyptian sarcophagi and the cataclysmic ending (and despite Jonas Mekas’ title), Smith’s film lacks the marked mysticism of the works just preceding it, adhering almost exclusively to Sears-Roebuck-style people, animals and objects engaged in a cryptically surreal, stream-of-consciousness unfolding. Influenced by Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness(1903), passages from which he once read over the film as it played, Smith also claimed he was animating his dreams. “The exact relation between his dreams and the structure of the film is ambiguous,” remarks P. Adams Sitney, “unless we can suppose that he dreamed the life of the figures he had already cut out and assembled for his film. What is more likely is that he established an intuitive relationship between the structure of his dreams and the substructure of the film.”

Film No. 13 (Oz or The Magic Mushroom People) was to be a feature-length, widescreen 35mm film for the masses. On Smith’s alternate route to Emerald City, Oz would be separated into different lands such as “Hieronymus Bosch Land” or “Microscopia” with the iconic characters as originally drawn by W.W. Denslow in L. Frank Baum’s original book. Thanks to Allen Ginsberg’s promotion, Smith’s ambitious visions were matched with generous funding from a group of wealthy heirs and philanthropists, including Elizabeth Taylor. He took full advantage of this unexpected largesse by building an animation studio, hiring friends and keeping drugs flowing over a year of intensive work. The production came to a halt with the overdose death of their primary funder, Henry Phipps, and when the remaining investors were shown the nine completed minutes of film, they had the studio’s locks changed and much of the work destroyed. Film No. 16 begins with only a few minutes of the beautiful psychedelic wonderworld that could have been, and abruptly shifts to film Smith shot in 1968 through his handmade teleidoscope. Only directly related to the earlier scenes through the color scheme, these dazzling, mirrored portals reflect Smith’s intention “to convert Oz into a Buddhistic image like a mandala.”