Underground film is an epitaph. It describes what no longer is. And while it may be impossible to exactly date the time of death, the underground film is long departed. By the 1970s, as P. Adams Sitney notes in his history of underground and experimental film, underground filmmakers have entered the establishment. Now academy fellows and grant recipients, underground filmmakers no longer work at the margins.1 Vanished too is the cultural milieu that engendered underground film. Today, amidst the vertically integrated regime of multiplex theatre chains, professional film schools, streaming web sites, home recording and editing gear, media megaliths, video galleries, Sundance Film fetes, Blockbuster Video and ‘independent’ film production, there is no autonomous space for underground films to be created, screened or imagined. Habitat and species are both extinct.
This is not to say that all latter-day film productions now reflect only those values that provoke no dissent from the mammoth corporations and prestigious cultural institutions that organise the mature film industry. Plenty of productions rightfully make studio heads, curators and rating boards squirm. Resistant films and videos marshalling oppositional messages are not uncommon. The limits of the envelope, the brittle lines that define the good, the right and the permissible are all still open to contention and revision.
What has closed is the bohemian film frontier. Once, singular cineastes were free to explore the nascent possibilities in a relatively unfettered and unknown medium. Today, in marked contrast, film production, distribution and exhibition are now so well-integrated and so well-regulated that there is no realm beyond the pall of the mainstream. Case in point: two years after MTV premiered in the United States, they called upon Picture Start for access to their film collection. A well-established and now defunct distributor of underground film, Picture Start had an enormous thirty-year archive of difficult, aesthetically rigorous film. MTV wanted to cut up the collection of several thousand films and use the disassembled bits for wild bumpers between outré rock videos. Within months, MTV ran through Picture Start’s entire archive of outsider film; subsequently, many of Picture Start’s most original artists found work in the burgeoning rock video industry. There are countless variations of this tale. All versions share the same conclusion: the redoubt between the mainstream and the recondite hinterlands has been breached. Where there were once two distinct classes of production, with very little shared intercourse bridging the two worlds of mainstream and underground filmmaking, film work today operates across major and minor leagues that are in incessant communication.
A CLEMENT FREEBOOTER
One of the signal American pioneers of underground film, Harry Smith (1923–91) produced work that can be best understood as a cryptic tutorial from a fallen world. An archetypal bohemian, Smith led an astoundingly varied and productive life that he consistently embroidered with not entirely improbable fancies (among his fabulous asseverations: he was the son of famed English necromancer Aleister Crowley, and his mother was the fabled Anastasia – last of the vanquished Romanovs). Born in Portland, Oregon to parents versed in Theosophy, Smith would spend most of his early years in rural Washington on an island north of Seattle. Living close to a Lummi Indian reservation, Smith developed a lifelong interest in anthropology and cultural production. After a few semesters at Washington State, he abandoned his formal education and embarked to California in 1945. There, a prototypical Beat, he became a member of the Berkeley demimonde.
Smith would spend most of his life in and around New York City. A genuine polymath, he would paint epic paintings of seminal bop composition, pursue filmmaking, become adept in the Occult and the Cabala, document the peyote rituals of the Kiowa, produce The Fugs and, among countless other projects, amass important and impossibly varied collections of cultural artifacts. These heterodox collections, many of which ended up in museums, include Seminole textiles, paper airplanes, Ukrainian Easter Eggs, string figures and a mammoth, awe-inspiring collection of 78s. In his final years, Smith was the resident shaman at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.2
Smith’s most well-known production is his Anthology of American Folk Music. First issued on Folkways Records in 1952, the three-volume Anthology sparked the American folk revival. (Smithsonian/Folkways Recording has reissued the Anthology with new critical essays and an expanded CD that includes clips of Smith’s films, paintings and a look at some of his collections. Smith planned a fourth volume that was released posthumously in 2000 on Revenant Records.) Culled from his enormous collection of musical Americana, Smith authored a sweeping survey of distant folk and blues recordings that, as Greil Marcus put it, ‘made the familiar strange, the never known into the forgotten, and the forgotten into a collective memory that teased any single listener’s conscious mind’.3 The Anthology did for sound what his films would do for vision: Smith remade perception.
Smith challenged his audience to hear anew. For example, the set alternated performances by white and black artists. In his detailed notes Smith does not, however, make any mention of a performer’s race. In so doing, Smith erases the colour line and leaves his audience unable to apply one of the fundamental organising principles of American culture. Instead of documenting black and white music, the anthology sounded American music.
In addition, decades before the DJ was recognised as a fluid composer in his or her own right, Smith was an aural bricoleur of the first order. The Anthology is a marvelously inventive soundscape in which every musician voices their own unique plight and sings as part of an incredibly rowdy and raucous chorus. Echoing one another in harmony and discord, with fellow feeling and rancor, Smith’s singers are commonly afflicted with hot blood, shared sorrows and aching hearts. In league and embattled, the characters of Smith’s great, quilted composition welcome us to an America that could not otherwise be known.
This work, along with his films, also provides an even more fundamental and counter-intuitive insight. Smith demonstrates that perception is a malleable instrument. Sounds have no necessary meaning. Believing is not seeing and Smith is an anti-empiricist. His projects treat sense data, what comes in through the eyes and ears, as raw material that has value only after it has been run through the mind. As the Anthology so clearly demonstrates, change the rigging of the mind, make race an unimportant variable, and hearing is reborn.
In the same fashion, Smith’s films rework vision. Absent are all the familiar conventions of mainstream cinema, as if there were no Hollywood and no film history prior to his highly idiosyncratic engagement with celluloid; his films absolve viewers from the sin of cinematic knowledge. Shorn of all the familiar guideposts that make watching film an act of déjà vu, Smith’s productions are vertiginous constructs. In leading us astray, they offer a fresh start to viewers who might reasonably assume, having been subject to so many well-ordered and well-policed films, that films are obliged to obey soporific convention.
Smith’s immaculate conceptions will likely return first-time viewers to their primal encounter(s) with the moving image. This merger, the moment when moving images make their first indelible impression on the unlettered viewer, is the time when both audience and image become contractually bound. Out of these first momentous unions comes the foreknowledge of what the moving image will bring as audience expectations for the future are made fast. Offering both a delicious, pregnant promise, this is what you can expect, and a firm contract, this is what you will receive; these formative engagements plot out the course audiences and films will share into the foreseen future. In this regard, learning to look at the screen is always a great bargain because the spectacle of the cinema has never, at any moment in its history, proffered anything less than resplendent temptation. Learning to see is also a terrible exercise in collusion; too many strange byways are foreclosed in fealty to the tyranny of audience expectation nurtured by a woefully rational mode of industrial production.
Since no one is ushered into the world of moving images by Harry Smith (Charizard, Winky, Pooh or the Mouse will clinch that distinction), a first encounter with a Smith construction occurs long after film literacy is mastered. As such, Smith’s films come as a shock to the system. Seeing his films for the first time is analogous to taking a routine eye test, reading the letters on the top line and finding that all the familiar marks belong to an unknown system of signification. We should be able to read them as our perceptual apparatus is intact, we can make out what is onscreen, but these images are not readily processed. Looking nothing like anything produced by commercial and independent filmmakers, exposure to Smith’s images will discomfort amblyopic viewers as they reveal a world that cannot be handily envisioned.
Compounding the effect of Smith’s novel and enigmatic imagery, these films are not structured like the work of his distant compatriots. Telling no tales, as Smith ignores narrative from his first to last film, these compositions are free to explore dimensions of the cinema that are off-limits when filmmakers assume the burdensome mantle of storyteller. And while the practice of releasing cinema from narrative is not remarkable in experimental and underground film – Takehisa Kosugi screened movies without bothering to thread a film through the projector, Stan Brakhage cultivated variegated molds on film, while Ernie Gehr made History (1970) by exposing film through black cheesecloth without benefit of a lens – Smith still manages to produce non-narrative work that is unmistakably his own.
In fabricating unprecedented imagery and leaving story to others, Smith’s work presents a formidable challenge. Some films, like Number 14 (aka Late Super-Impositions, 1964), may not even seem viewable upon first exposure. Number 14 is a half hour of super-imposed home movies. Tedious even when we are the star, home movies can become very demanding when they document the anonymous lives of rank strangers. Imagine then a double layer of unknown home movies, one nameless amateur production atop another, run for just over thirty minutes. Not, for many, an inviting prospect.
Perhaps even more disconcerting, many of his earliest efforts are not really films at all. Available collectively as Early Abstractions, Nos. 1–5 (1946–51), these are hand-painted compositions on celluloid. Film that is not filmed is about as contrary a step to the medium that one can take. In painting, sprinkling, spraying, dribbling and wiping colours directly on film, Smith dispenses with the camera and demonstrates that a seemingly vital piece of equipment for cinematic production is, in fact, an altogether unnecessary accessory. In so doing, Smith creates compositions that are raggedly assembled and very beautiful. Smith would not permanently abandon the camera, but even his optically-printed images come to the screen as through a lens darkly.
Smith’s images have no analogues in commercial modes of production. Nothing in the mainstream, from the 1940s to the present, looks like these early designs. Both clumsy and magical, they are unparalled creations. Like an unholy fusion of a gifted toddler’s craft project and a Platonic dream – with the world rendered in pure Form – these films are a testament to Smith’s dogged ingenuity and his shambolic vision. Taking an incredible amount of exacting labour to produce, without ever looking remotely polished, these early films document a sparkling naivety. Smith’s innocent vision, his freedom from cinematic order, graces the audience with a new mode of cinematic production and a magical passage into curious modes of perception.
There are, along with the challenges elaborated above, additional impositions made on Smith’s audience. Until the film runs out, his earliest works depict nothing but the ceaseless transformation of simple forms (triangles, circles and the like) into new spheres and geometric shapes. Later, Smith would abandon drawing directly on film in favour of collage. With this new technique, Smith’s imagery became grotesquely intricate. Using countless bits and pieces snipped from turn-of-the-century catalogues, alongside images wrested from Indian, Buddhist and Egyptian iconography, Smith’s insanely elaborate collages dance across the screen in complex patterns that are part of ever-larger repetitive cycles. As with the earliest work there is little in the mainstream to prepare the viewer for Smith’s extremely individual cinema.
In offering a provisional reading of Smith’s work it would be manifestly unfair to him and his novel creations to define them as part of an oppositional cinema. ‘Different from’ need not be synonymous with ‘opposed to’. In taking another tack, Smith’s work does not protest against the limits of the medium and the hegemonic power of the film bloc. These films make no attempt, even implicitly, to suggest that they are superior to run of the mill fare. Nor is his work a protest against a quiescent audience. He did not see the audience as needing correction. Just the opposite; late in life he contemplated re-editing his films so that new audiences might find his work more inviting. Believing that young people could process information more quickly than his aging peers, Smith thought the solution to reaching a contemporary audience lay in reforming the work rather than in re-educating the public.
NO GURU, NO METHOD, NO TEACHER
Harry Smith should not be cast as a rebel. While he did live and work almost entirely outside the system, his film art is too hermetic to be read as kicking against the pricks. For the good of pitched antagonists and their enemies, agitprop must be direct and pointed in its dissent. If not didactic, then it must be very straightforward in its departure from the limits of common practice. Anything but clear-cut, Smith’s work chides no one. Harbouring no covert manifesto, it is not even remotely ideological. It should not and cannot be screened for unambiguous direction. In the end, Smith’s film-work is the production of a diffident Gnostic who will gladly share his vision without ever proselytising.
Smith also discouraged acolytes by creating absurdly labour-intensive work. These films took hundreds upon hundreds of hours to produce. Like many other landmarks of obsessive art, the Watts Towers and the Nek Chand Rock Gardens, this work is beyond the physical limits of all but a handful of driven visionaries. Fashioning work impossible to mimic, Smith has no method to communicate. Yet Smith’s inimitable singularity is also his greatest gift, because what he inspires is not a method of practise, but a way of seeing. Unfortunately, given the private mystery of vision, the measure of Smith’s success is not easily taken. There is no ready measure of influence when an interrogative optician changes something as elemental as sight.
Generally, whatever is filmed, from George Méliès’ 1902 moon excursion to Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), carries with it the inescapable feel of the real. Even the most improbable fictions appear before us with impossible clarity. Bearing delicious visual and aural feasts, film is an amazingly limpid medium. It seems to work without mediation. Nothing appears to come between the original image, whatever was filmed, and projected reality. It is perfectly transparent. Film is, in this regard, like the perfect poison. It works its dark, irreversible magic without leaving a trace. Conversely, while no medium is capable of such discrete reserve, no medium is also so well-suited for spectacle. Nothing can so fully involve, even dominate, the spectator like a film. Larger and louder than life, film immerses the audience in a near-total sensory overload. At once self-effacing and grand, invisible and over-powering, film tattoos memory with unforgettable images while managing to never call undue attention to itself.
The retiring grandiloquence of the cinema poses a particularly vexing problem for viewers. Despite its overwhelming aura of verisimilitude, cinema is incapable of presenting things as they are. Movies do not present unmediated access to things-in-themselves. And while duplicitous images do mimic the real with great sensuous conviction, appearing proximate to reality itself, what we see is not what is. Indeed, when paying rapt attention to the life of things onscreen, ‘we do not perceive the thing or the image in its entirety, we always perceive less of it, we perceive only what we are interested in perceiving.… We therefore normally perceive only clichés.’4 Not only does the cinema avoid the truth and fail to bring us things as they are, it also offers visual confirmation for our stalest truisms.
Smith manages to reverse these powerful forces and restore us to things as they are by rendering film opaque. In checking cinematic distortion, it should be clear that Smith did not reject the spectacle of film. In a series of experiments, most ill-fated, Smith made a series of complex lighting gels and frames to augment his screenings; he devised synchronised projection systems to show multiple films simultaneously; he envisioned special sensory chairs for specific films, with variable shapes, sizes and wired effects tailored to the individual personality of the filmgoer and their location in the auditorium; he invented an ultra-deep focus device that would allow a camera lens to descend through multiple planes of imagery. He also embarked on a very expensive and time-consuming attempt at remaking The Wizard of Oz (1939). But in expanding the possibilities for the camera and spectator, Smith always took special care never to allow the film apparatus to disappear from sight. All of his films are self-conscious film productions.
FIGMENTS OF TRUTH
Aside from never allowing the film apparatus to slink from view, an important corrective, how does Smith engineer a cinema incapable of fostering a lie and underpinning untruth? More accurately, how does Smith transcend perjury, as no film is altogether capable of telling the truth? The short answer: he returns us to the things themselves. Having admitted that this cannot be done, that the very nature of film as a mediating gauze places the real at an unbridgeable distance, how does Smith manage an impossible feat?
Having early in his career painted large canvases that could easily be taken for film stills from his later work, Smith responds to the challenge of cinema in the same fashion as besieged painters responded to the invention of photography. What could painting do when photography captures the real with far greater ease and precision than even the deftest brush-wielder could realise? In the shadow of the photograph, painters ceded reality to photography and revisioned painting as a necessarily unrealistic art form. Instead of simulating three dimensions via complex trompe l’oeil effects, painters opted to explore the canvas as a flat plane. Freed from simulating reality in two dimensions, painters could use the canvas as a plane upon which to test new modes of vision.
Smith will approach film in the same fashion. Instead of appropriating film as an illegitimate conduit for the real, Smith treats the medium as if it were best suited to depict only height and width. The argument that Smith is a painter on film gains currency when we take into account the absence of depth of field in almost all his films. Everything stays on the same plane. Depth and perspective are abandoned. In so doing, Smith makes moving paintings. This is not a terminological quibble because in creating films without depth of field, Smith has fashioned a cinema that gives up film’s most powerful reality effect. Lifelike worlds with three spatial dimensions are worlds that we might enter. Images that fail to proffer this illusion foreclose the possibility that they can be read as potential habitations. Uncompromisingly flat, these films offer no range for movement. Absent the magnetic illusion of three dimensions, Smith creates cinematic spaces that are exclusive and uninviting. When a Smith film is projected on the screen, we are faced with a film that must be looked upon as a flat canvas and not an open space.
Defining Smith as a painterly filmmaker does not mean there is no distinction to be drawn between his work on canvas and his film compositions. Even the most robust action painting is inert. Film allows Smith to make mobile canvases and gain an important measure of control over time. A century after the introduction of photography, Smith can restore painting to three dimensions; this time, however, Smith will create animate paintings with a novel and unprecedented combination of three-dimensionality: height, width and time. Time in hand, Smith takes painting to a new realm.
Animating frozen canvas across time, Smith initially composes painterly film images from simple geometrical shapes that exist only as ideations and mathematical constructs. In so doing, he creates an animate Platonic universe in which the world of Form dances on parade. A metaphysical Sesame Street, the Early Abstractions are a phantasmagoric revel in the abstractions of the mind.
There are no empirically available coordinates for the images of the Early Abstractions. Circles, triangles and rectangles are not to be found in the world of the senses. These are immutable Universals and they do not exist on this plane. In the ready-to-hand arena of sense data there are only transient particulars. Instead of timeless circles, triangles and rectangles, there are only dented coffee can lids, scarred shark fins and friable concrete blocks. Any perception of circularity, triangularity or the like is the final product of mental machinations.
Instead of purporting to show the things themselves, Smith will illuminate the constructs we employ to approach the things themselves. In his hands cinema is not a recording device, it is an instrument of analysis. This then is the key to understanding how Smith avoids cinematic fraud. Instead of presenting duplicitous a priori assertions, Smith’s cinema is open to philosophic interrogation.
His films assay perception in an attempt to divine the epistemological utility of the senses. Rejecting cinema as a transparent, realistic enterprise, Smith returns over and again to the question of what can be known of images and their worldly correlates. Holding that what we see and hear depends on the mechanisms of thought, Smith is an idealist. He abjures any direct connection between the screen and the things of the world. Insisting that there is no way of readily knowing what is real and what is a shared or individual phantasm, Smith’s films beckon us to reconsider how we produce sense.
Of course, this sounds infernally dull as the subject of film. May as well plow through the writings of Berkeley, Russell or Kant. What makes Smith a filmmaker and not a philosopher with diverting visual aids is that these arguments are only the sub-text of an entirely involving synergetic experience. And while it is vital to underscore Smith’s idealism, these films are more than arid philosophical ruminations. Always challenging us to rethink the foundation upon which we make sense of images, Smith never abandons the hedonistic potential of the screen.
In Early Abstractions, for instance, consider how Smith depicts the multiple shapes that constitute our geometric vocabulary. Taking perception back to basic forms, Smith cuts his films with exacting attention to rhythm. Most of the early films move in 4/4 time so that his arithmetic arabesques metamorphose into various permutations as part of a kinetic dance. No tweedy Don ever considered the question of appearance and reality with such slinky grace. At many later screenings, Smith would sync the Early Abstractions with The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night (1964). In tandem with a backbeat that cannot be misplaced, Smith’s time signatures are unmistakable.
Smith always cut with attention to rhythm. On numerous occasions he mentioned how his films were edited in synchrony with the beat of the heart and the intake of breath. And while it is doubtful that he realised this aim – to do so would take a complex polyrhythm, as the heart and lungs do not contract with the same pulse – it is certain that Smith’s films are exquisitely in time. In returning us to the elements, Smith always keeps the beat. Fashioned for the head, these films never leave the body behind.
Rhythm aligns time with the body. Absent rhythm, time is an infinite and featureless expanse of interminable duration. By dividing time into repeating cycles of varying duration, rhythm makes time manageable and meaningful. Finding the rhythm of the moment is a crucial component of human knowing. Feeling the world rushing by, as time takes flight, and feeling the world crawl, as time slows down, our perceptions of duration are dependent on refined judgement. Just as we learn to interpret the things we see, chronographic perception is not a given. We have to find the beat.
In Number 11 (1957), Smith synchronises the images of his previous effort, Number 10 (1956), with Thelonious Monk’s ‘Mysterioso’. By this time, Smith has left behind simple figures for the semiotic blizzard of wildly heteroclite collages. Seemingly impossible to fully interpret, but a lysergic mindwash to watch, Number 11 and Number 10 collectively demonstrate how important rhythm is when making meaning from the buzzing, blooming confusion of an enigmatic world.
Without Monk’s snaky piano, Number 10 is a fever dream involving a tireless letter carrier attempting to communicate with his beloved. Amidst grave dancers glad in wispy silks, jangling skeletons, Kali, moon mushroom, and so much more, the film is an impossible rebus. How to make sense of it all? Sided with Monk’s measured stroll across the keys, the film coheres. Patterns too complex to be perceived in silence emerge as the music takes off. Soon Monk’s music begins to change too. A bop classic, when paired with Smith’s imagery, ‘Mysterioso’ is re-cut. Anyone who has heard it before will hear the tune afresh in the light of Smith’s numinous imagery. Remedial synesthesia, Numbers 10 and 11 demonstrate how understanding is an alchemical wonder fashioned from the senses, the pulse of the body and the mental constructs that underlie perception.
Smith’s last readily available films take these mental and physical gymnastics to the brink. Number 12 (1957–61), better known as Heaven and Earth Magic, and Number 14 are acid tests. As mentioned above, Number 14 is thirty minutes of super-imposed home movies accompanied by selections from Brecht and Weills’s ‘The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny’. Edited down from a length of eight hours or more, Number 12 is an hour-long distillation of Smith’s most elaborate and abstruse collage. Imagine Rube Goldberg and Hieronymus Bosch animating the same frame in tandem with Currier and Ives. Difficult in the extreme to describe, Number 12, in Smith’s words…
depicts the Heroine’s toothache consequent to the loss of a very valuable water-melon, her dentistry and transportation to heaven… the second part depicts the return to the earth from being eaten by Max Muller on the day Edward the Seventh dedicated the Great Sewer of London.5
NOT, IT WOULD SEEM, A LOT TO GO ON
Surprisingly, after endless hours of research, Smith’s description of Number 12 can be distilled into something resembling a straight-ahead plot summary. Similarly, with a comprehensive Smith bio in hand, the doubled images of Number 14 can be matched with the events of Smith’s life. Critics have laboured mightily to read these films as cognitive labyrinths and Occult armories stockpiled with highly cultivated and deeply veiled Theosophical arcana.6 And while all of these well-intentioned efforts offer meaningful insights into Smith’s idiosyncratic practice, they fail to adequately address the true challenge of Smith’s most difficult work.
These films represent the limit point of Smith’s respect for and appreciation of the viewer. In constructing films that resist interpretation with an adamantine vengeance, Smith gives his viewers a chance to make their own way amidst an amazing scrap-heap of visual detritus and aural cacophony. Like multi-media Lego blocks, these films can be assembled howsoever you see fit. In keeping with Artaud’s epigram gracing American Magus: Harry Smith, Smith’s Ideal cinema proclaims ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.’ Fortunately, this entitlement cannot be exercised lightly. Only in the face of difficult challenges does the liberty to do as we wish have value.
A pioneer from the film frontier, Smith did not chart unexplored territory so that we might comfortably make our way to settled ground. A cartographer with an animus for maps, Smith charges us to connect the dots. Sending us packing, Smith produced a body of complex work riddled with cruel doubt. No image is to be trusted. At the same time, he saturated the screen with mobile illuminations alive with wonder and serendipitous beauty. What we make of terrible and magnificent icons is our own choosing.