We got on the subject of a one Harry Smith in class the other day, who I had never heard of before.
His claim to 'fame' was as an experimental filmmaker throughout the central part of the 20th century, painting each frame by hand between fistfuls of butter, sugar and probably acid. He also carried a tape recorder. Anthologies of American Folk Music is a massive collection of 78 recordings of oft-forgotten music he collected from the 20s and 30s. Various recordings he did of Allen Ginsberg et al reading in his apartment, and peyote ritual songs from his time living with the Kiowa Indians have also been released in some form.
The third film in this clip, is a 'note for note' painted transcription of Dizzy Gillepsie's 'Manteca.' It took smith 2 years to paint the 3 minute piece. I unfortunately couldn't find a clip with good audio. There's some cool recordings of him ranting about stuff on the website.
Then Harry began painting directly on the film strip, thus avoiding the cost of extra negatives and prints, except, of course that Hy Hirsh had to help with optical printing to ensure that the delicate painted film-strip was not scraped or scratched during the lab's printing process. On May 12, 1950, Art in Cinema screened the premiere of four painted films by Harry Smith. They were titled Strange Dream, Message from the Sun, Interwoven and Circular Tensions and the program notes [stated] that each one of the hundreds of painted film frames is a work of art. The films were accompanied by a live jazz band...Harry told me that he was jazz-crazy at that time, particularly for Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonius Monk, and insisted that he had synchronized the first three painted films to jazz performances by Dizzy Gillespie: Guarachi Guaro, Algo Bueno and Manteca. - Dr. William Moritz, "Harry Smith, Mythologist,"
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