The Movies of Harry Smith

Harry Smith was an important figure in the American avant-garde scene of the mid twentieth century. He was a collector, an occultist, a bohemian, a druggie, a musicologist and important archiver of American folk music (a reissue of his anthology received two Grammies in 1997).

The Chauvel showed his movies with an apology - two hours of abstract film is not easy to sit through, the convener said.

The show opened with animated abstract paintings boogying on down to early Beetles music. Two things struck me – 1) just how good early Beetles music actually is, and 2) how nice it is that, instead of plodding around an art gallery for an hour, you can sit in a darkened room sipping wine (it's allowed in this cinema) and have the paintings come to you.

The set then moved on to a very long film that resembled Terry Gilliam’s animation work for Monty Python – moving cut-outs of Victorian gadgets and occult symbolism all dancing around to random sound effects.

The whole thing is designed to mess with your bourgeois brain but it is far too entertaining to be threatening. My guess is that this is because Smith himself liked a bit of pop entertainment (it's in all his stuff) – maybe he just couldn’t help himself. Personally, I liked it.

The final film is a photo film montage with opera - there's European stuff in it and Native American - Smith was into Shamanism.

It's impressive just how much work has gone into these films. Smith had a lot of interests and his teeming brain is reflected here.