Edited from eleven hours of footage, Smith’s magnum opus (or “’One’ Big Ceremony”) was ten years in the making and consisted of four 16mm projections in a square. The film premiered at Anthology Film Archives in 1980, and Smith described it in his press release as “a mathematical analysis of Duchamp’s [The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even or The Large Glass] expressed in terms of Kurt Weill’s score for [Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny] with contrapuntal images (not necessarily in order) derived from Brecht’s libretto for the latter work.” However, Jonas Mekas offered that, “as The Large Glass is shattered, Harry shattered Brecht’s original. He didn’t interpret Brecht’s opera, he transformed it.” Obsessed with the opera, Smith said he selected it as a basis for the film not only for its musical complexity and “sections that approximate the sounds of other musical cultures…,” but also because of its simple, universal story: “the joyous gathering together of a great number of people, their breaking of the rules of liberty and love, and consequent fall into oblivion.” The four screens feature four sets of imagery—portraits, animation, symbols and nature—which communicate with one another in myriad ways and are interrupted by a variety of “uncategorized” shots and visual pauses. With this experiment, Smith was really testing the limits of cinema. As John Szwed summarizes: “Out-of-sync sequences, overexposure, reversed images, speed changes, repetition of images, reframing and reshaping the screen from rectangle to square, and verbal disruptions of the performances—all would appear to be an effort to expose and demystify the techniques of conventional narrative motion pictures.” Smith also tested the patience of Mekas, who had to manage the director’s increasingly volatile antics during shows. Its limited theatrical run did not appear to overly trouble Smith, who noted that Mahagonny “was designed to be shown over a 500-year period, or so, and consequently will scarcely be a box office smash during my life time: but will continually grow in popularity and be there for the increasingly large number of people who have the consciousness to unravel its cryptograms.” The new 4K DCP was created from the 2002 restoration that combined the four 16mm screens onto a single 35mm film.

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