Harry Smith (1923-1991) was a post-beatnik pre-beat American musicologist, painter, cinematographer and if you knew who he was, you’re cooler than me. Smith’s most famous endeavor was compiling his massive 78 collection into The Anthology of American Folk Music, which has been described as a aural Rosetta Stone that many say influenced the mid-60s folk revivial. It earned him a Grammy (awarded in 1991) and has recently been rereleased on Smithsonian Folkways Records.

Even now Smith would be considered ‘weird’ but in pre-WWII America he was an ‘wildly eccentric bohemian’. Highly influenced by music, mathematics, occult, shamanism and the dadaists, Smith painted large works (all of which he destoyed in a fit) and his films range from hypnotic to absurd to purely confounding. Recently as part of the SF Int’l Film Fest (of which I’m a citizen blogger or some such modernness) I saw a 66 min animated film entitled ‘Heaven and Earth Magic.’ and while I grapsped zero meaning or significance the imagery is still moving through my head almost 5 days later. Smith cut images from a 19th century catalog such as a corset, a watermelon, ladies head, dancing man, mechanical parts and wove a tale as inscrutable as Salvador Dali’s smile. Knowing nothing about the man before I left the theatre, I was frustrated by the continual sequences of meaningless items interacting. The theme and variation over the course of the hour forced me to ponder my desire for meaning and reminded me the wonders absurdists such as Dada, Duchamp and Raspa offer our understanding of everything we simply expect to be.

An added bonus and pain was the musical accompaniment of Deerhoof, a local indie rock outfit who correographed a soundtrack that ranged from sublime to infuriating. Considering the mind of the filmaker I’ll credit them with accepting a very challenging task and would assume Smith would have appreciated the extended discordinance.

As done as I was with the event upon leaving the Castro theatre my brain, when I let it drift, keeps replaying what it tivo’d … picking thru the animated sequences and reviewing them like flatware in a drawer that someone told me will tell a story but I know possibly can’t. I read about another movie he made in 1941 using those stickers that reinforce paper holes for 3-ring binder which he patterned with vasoline and paint. Watching it is descirbed in wikipedia as ‘ hypnotic, psychedelic and is something like a visual music.’