Color Study
Posted by ben on 22 Jan 2007 at 07:09 pm | Tagged as: music, video/film
Someone has been kind enough to upload a bunch of short, abstract Harry Smith films to YouTube (the lazy blogger’s best friend). Harry Smith is known to fans of folk music as the compiler of the Folkways anthology, an important document of early American folk. But his film work, inspired by alchemy and the occult as much as it was by modern art, is just as important. Kenneth Anger referred to him as the “greatest living magician.” But for Smith, the music he loved and the films he made went hand in hand. Many of these early films were screened during jazz concerts in San Francisco and New York. Smith said that he made the work for contemporary music, and talked about the films in terms of synaesthesia of color and sound. For this reason, his work is considered a precursor to ’60s psychedelic culture. You can read more about him and his work at the Harry Smith Archives. This particular film, Color Study, was made in 1952 (the music was added by the person who stuck it on YouTube):
Ben finds the coolest things and I learns things I shoulda learnt years ago.
FutureWorkerGirl reminds me that we saw some Harry Smith in East Lansing, Michigan, projected in the private screening room of an off-the-wall collector of experimental moving images. We met him a little while before we moved to Texas; his name escapes me.
Great to see work like that projected big.
I say that outloud and it echoes.
P.S. lazyblogger: search YouTube for Olivia Dunn Wonder Woman