Light Shows
Absolut Panushka, Jan-Apr 1997.
Light Shows
In 1946 the brothers Frank and Jack Stauffacher curated an “Art in Cinema, a Symposium on the Avantgarde Film,” for the San Francisco Museum of Art. The festival showed classic live-action experimental films as well as recent works such as Maya Deren’s Psychodramas. To organize the festival, the Stauffacher brothers turned to local art students for help. Among them was Harry Smith.
Smith grew up in Oregon and Washington, with Theosophist parents and considerable contact with the Native Americans in that region. He had been wavering between art and anthropology in his college studies, until the Stauffachers sent him to Los Angeles to try to convince Oskar Fischinger and the Whitney brothers to travel to San Francisco for their programs. After meeting the filmmakers, Smith made a decision: He realized that Fischinger and James Whitney had found a vehicle that could combine mystical and artistic expressions; and, lacking a camera, he began painting directly on film stock.
Since neither Len Lye nor Norman McLaren were screened at the Art in Cinema, Smith had no idea that other filmmakers had already used this technique. In any case, his films had a very different, personal style. His first film (Film No. 1) centered on surrealist figures drawn with a fine-tipped pen, unlike McLaren’s thicker brushed lines. His next films, Film No. 2 and Film No. 3 (he referred to them only by number), used “batiking” to animate large geometric shapes, as in some Fischinger films, but here with the pulsing vibrations of the paint.
These films were shown at the successive Art in Cinema festivals (which occurred yearly until the early 1950s) accompanied by live jazz. Smith also showed them at jazz clubs like Bop City (where he also painted large abstract murals) as “Light Shows” with musical sets by performers like Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonius Monk. Although Smith never made sound prints of the films, the images are constructed on musical principles that synchronize easily with Gillespie’s “Manteca” and “Guarachi Guaro,” two of Smith’s favorites.
On the strength of artistry in these first films, Smith received a grant from the Baroness Hilla von Rebay to produce further abstract films for the Guggenheim Museum. Smith moved to New York, where he began conventional animation of geometric forms on paper and cels, the first of which he called Circular Tensions: Homage to Oskar Fischinger.
Smith began to combine the animated strips by using multiple projectors, both film and slide, and re-photographing the results from the screen. Using this technique, he prepared his masterpiece, Film No. 7 (Color Study), which rivals the complexity of Kandinsky’s paintings and the ingenious choreography of Fischinger’s works.
Moritz, William. “History of Experimental Animation.” Website. Absolut Panushka, curated by Christine Panushka. (Jan-Apr 1997).