To be an animator requires a methodical and systematic mind, diligence and meticulous attention to detail, and the patience and sheer stamina to withstand long-haul, labour-intensive and hideously fiddly work. Harry Smith was unusually endowed with these qualities. Although best known for his work as a collector of obscure folk and blues 78 rpm recordings (resulting in 1952’s epochal and hugely influential six-LP compilation The Anthology of American Folk Music), Smith ’s true passion was animation.
Using various self-developed techniques of hand-painting and marking the film using masking tape, working with scratch-board drawings, and cut-out images, Smith would spend years holed up in his New York apartment toiling over a single film. His animations often reached several hours in length and required drastic editing down before he could show them. Many projects were abandoned in an unfinished state. On their rare public performances, Smith would project the films onto special painted screens of his own construction. Music – usually jazz – was central to his work, as with the original version of Thelonious Monk’s “Misterioso” that soundtracks “Mirror Animations”.
Like his hour-long masterpiece “Heaven and Earth Magic”, “Mirror Animations” ((1956-57) emerged out of Smith’s obsessive collation of illustrative material from 19th Century catalogues. He filed the cut-outs – photographs or drawings of people, animals, vegetables, tools, furniture, and sundry other objects - in glassine envelopes for protection, while noting on file cards every possible interaction that a given image could have with another image. Yet, contradicting all this obsessive-compulsive preparation, when it came to the assembly process, Smith aimed for a state of mental vacancy akin to automatic writing.
The deliberately stilted movements of the snipped-out images have a quaint and creaky quality that casts back to the magic lanterns of the 17th Century. Magic of a different kind – not conjuring tricks and illusions, but the occult and hermetic knowledge – suffuses Smith’s work. Some of the imagery in “Mirror Animations” looks like it’s plucked straight off a set of Tarot cards. No wonder film-maker and critic Jonas Mekas celebrated “the magic cinema of Harry Smith” while avant-jazzman John Zorn hailed him as a “Mystical Animator”.