I like my films because I didn’t make them: God made them.

The passage of time seems to have only enhanced the artworld’s fascination with the enigmatic genius of Harry Smith (1923 – 1991) and his fragmented amalgam of a legacy. Existing as a semi-mythological creature even while alive, Smith regularly fabricated or embellished aspects of his origins and accomplishments, slipping in and out of peoples’ grasp with an intensity that could swing along a spectrum from kind and charismatic to belligerent. Throughout his time on this planet, he cultivated different audiences as a filmmaker, multimedia artist of every dimension, anthropologist, music anthologist, aural documentarian, quixotic mechanical engineer and expert on innumerable esoteric subjects. Aided by a deep interest in alchemy, magic, drug-induced states and Native American culture, along with his apparent asexuality and quantum view of an interconnected cosmos, he also seemed a prescient mystic. Recognizing patterns in everything, he was never a casual listener of music—including classical, folk, jazz, country, blues and all kinds of indigenous music—but experienced it as a complex, multidimensional communication that some of his films and paintings would attempt to analyze. He was also a famous collector, not only of rare records, but of objects such as Ukrainian Easter eggs, paper airplanes and string figures. His archivist and late-in-life friend Rani Singh adds that “Smith compulsively collected everything from books, pop-up books, audio recordings, Indian women’s beaded costumes, tarot cards, and gourds to things shaped like other things (spoons shaped like ducks, banks shaped like apples, anything shaped like a hamburger).” The myth of Harry Smith is further heightened by its gaps; a semi-transient lifestyle mixed with an unpredictable, frequently substance-addled and fiery nature led to his either losing or destroying many of his collections, art and writing. Fortunately, many of his films managed to endure.

Smith came of age in the small towns of Anacortes and Bellingham, Washington to unconventional parents who seem to have planted the seeds of Smith’s endless curiosity, creativity, inventiveness, ravenous appetite for books and deep interest in philosophy, ethnography, religion and the occult. Living near many Native American communities, he spent his teenage years a regular, trusted presence on local reservations. The residents allowed the earnest boy to study their customs and take down genealogies, snap photographs, make sketches and paintings, and record songs, stories, activities and sacred events on a 78-rpm disc-cutting machine. In the case of the Lummi, this was the first time they had been recorded by anyone. To this day, his time with the Native American nations remains a miraculous phenomenon; Smith and his like-minded peer Bill Hohn were given access to ceremonies even professional anthropologists had never witnessed. By all accounts, this relationship with Northwest Coast indigenous cultures was a respectful, creative collaboration. As John Szwed notes in his recent biography Cosmic Scholar, “In the only painting that survives, the dance is as Harry saw it, but the clothing is from an earlier era and based on what the elders had told him.” Smith’s projects included starting a dictionary of the Samish and Swinomish languages, inventing a system of dance notation, translating songs and folktales, documenting games and their instructions, and collecting various artifacts, many of which he donated to the Washington State Museum; a portion of those are now lost. 

Smith briefly studied anthropology at the University of Washington yet spent the rest of his life studying it on his own, in one way or another. This sometimes took the form of continued documentation of Native American life—including the Kiowa in Oklahoma and the Seminole of Florida—or his collections of cultural artifacts. As a teenager, he had already begun gathering rare and unusual records in what would become a lifelong obsession and as much a study of music as it was of the cultures who made it. Scouring thrift shops and placing classified ads, Smith amassed such a stunning collection of 78s that Moses Asch, who had just started Folkways Records, assigned him the task of curating an extensive anthology. The history-making, culture-changing Anthology of American Folk Music was released in 1952 and accompanied by Smith’s offbeat, collaged artwork and idiosyncratic liner notes—the whole package marked by both an anthropological fastidiousness and a disregard for any standard categorization or organization. Instead, the three double-album sets were organized by element (water, fire, air) and songs compiled in a mix of academic, intuitive and cryptic logic—reflecting, as Szwed puts it, Harry Smith’s “personal cosmology.” By the time of their release, these samples of eccentric, underground Americana were spectral sounds from a bygone era, from all regions of the country by different races and ethnicities, resonating an authentically American wildness and weirdness. The anthology very gradually shook the burgeoning new folk movement’s musicians and those to come. These albums in combination with Smith’s record collection sale to the New York Public Library may have even exceeded his expectations, if he had any: he preserved forgotten cultural artifacts, brought attention to self-taught artists still living in obscurity and altered the musical fabric of America. Today, everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Beck claims inspiration from his collection. Szwed notes that one of Smith’s most ardent fans, Bob Dylan, would eventually “record at least fifteen of his own versions of the eighty-four records in Smith’s collections.” In 1991, Harry Smith was finally honored by the industry with a Grammy. 

In concert with his record collecting, audio recording and various scholarly investigations, Smith had also been painting, drawing and making collages. By the late 40s, he was interested in intricately “transcribing” jazz music through painting, sometimes accompanied by a kind of instructive performance. Once he discovered abstract film, he recognized how motion could aid these efforts significantly. Though he was interested in the moving image since childhood, Smith was finally inspired to make films after he and Jordan Belson witnessed those of Oskar Fischinger at the San Francisco Museum of Art’s “Art in Cinema” program in 1946, the first time he had seen experimental film. Fischinger’s non-narrative, animated abstractions deeply impressed both artists. Hy Hirsh, who worked as a cinematographer and photographer, taught Belson and Smith the basics of the equipment, and Smith set to work on the painstakingly tedious task of painting and batiking 16mm film in layers, masking out the animated shapes at different points. Each film of a few minutes took about a year to produce. The results were beautifully dense, saturated dances of shape and color, reaching such complexity that seen today, they still retain an exciting energy and vibrance. He also filmed projected, moving shapes and began adding animated, often mystical, cut-out imagery in with the abstractions and eventually, multiple exposures of “real world” live action—creating new and intricate forms, rhythms and realities. Smith’s cinematic Wheel of Life continued to rotate unabated—through an aborted Wizard of Oz project and the four-screen, epic ceremony of Mahagonny—using a mix of technical wizardry and pragmatism with chance and his own brand of spiritual, structuralist techniques.

Literally thinking outside the box—of both the screen and the theater—Smith had ambitious, unheard-of ideas about making expansive, universally understood films. In addition to combining symbols and elements from his eclectic interests and a range of cultures, he filled his frames with either layers of paint and textures or multiple-exposures of life and action; for Film No. 3, he would speed up or slow down the images to live, improvised jazz music; he planned to project another film on a screen of collaged newspaper; he thought about the space around the image by making projected frames or animations that float around the “central” activity; he quadrupled the screen with Mahagonny; he constructed a special projector for Heaven and Earth Magic and imagined special seats that would trigger color changes as viewers shifted; he made 3-D films and conducted all kinds of visual experiments with flashing lights and after-images in the eye. (Even without added effects or projections, Smith’s seem barely contained by the screen. Filmmaker and onetime Smith assistant M. Henry Jones noted “a distinctly kinetic wit and a unique hypnotic dimension” to Smith’s exploding screen.) For Mahagonny, Smith had proposed projecting the four screens onto four pool tables with a backlit boxing ring hanging behind them. Another variety of three-dimensional experience, Harry Smith’s presence at shows added a visceral, unpredictable and slightly dangerous element, so that even if nothing was shown, the event was certainly seared into the audience’s minds forever.

Smith’s art and intellectual pursuits were his life and his unconventional life an art. Except for a few months he spent working as an aircraft engine degreaser during World War II, he never held down any kind of day-to-day job. Though he did earn the occasional dollar from his films, his records, research work and a few grants, Smith could be an unabashed freeloader who also enjoyed momentary patronage and frequent in-kind hospitality from the many friends who looked out for him. Other times, his anarchic ability to survive without a regular funding source seemed somewhat mysterious and miraculous. (Though even in the periods when he lived hand-to-mouth, Smith might spend donations on a book or fascinating object rather than a meal.)

This mercurial life intersected with that of many other artists, musicians and filmmakers. A cross-section over the years includes Jordan Belson, John and James Whitney, Dizzy Gillespie, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Percy Heath, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Shirley Clarke, Wendy Clarke, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. And this is not mentioning the assortment of scholars, scientists, heirs, inventors, tribal leaders and other interesting characters with whom Smith associated. Toward the end of Smith’s life, Allen Ginsberg secured him a gig at Naropa University in Colorado where he was Shaman-In-Residence, enthralling a new generation with his eccentricity, curiosity, art and audio recording practices and summer lecture series. He eventually returned to New York and in 1991, died while residing in his old haunt, the Chelsea Hotel.

One of the earliest abstract filmmakers painting directly on film, Smith was perhaps the first to use jazz with his films as well as live improvisational music with “non-objective” work—all now common practices. He may have made the earliest Surrealist, ready-made cut-out animation film; filmmakers like Jan Lenica, Lawrence Jordan and Terry Gilliam were soon to follow. His unique expanded cinema techniques have never really been replicated, and, of course, his folk anthology was a formative influence on the entire rock ‘n’ roll era. Despite much of his output disappearing, Smith’s impact on the world is nonetheless profound and continues to inspire reconsideration and interpretation. Smith once recounted his father giving him a blacksmith shop at the age of twelve and instructing him to “convert lead into gold.” Harry Smith would spend a lifetime doing just that. – Brittany Gravely