HARRY SMITH's Early Abstractions: Notes Towards an OST (via Automatic Synchronization)
By way of intro, I’ll briefly circumlocute the premise of this article by telling you how in the middle of reading the new 2023 biography Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith by John Szwed, I took a break to reread a bunch of the interviews with esoteric multimedia artists buried in various 1990s and 2000s back issues of Bananafish magazine, and then, on my way back to Szwed and subject Smith, took one more pit-stop to pull my well-worn copy of the Film Culture Reader (1970, Praegar Publishers, pictured below) and hit up a quick reread of the 1965 interview with Smith conducted by P. Adams Sitney, and I swear to you, in a suitably Phildickian time-slip, this entire Harry Smith interview, or at least very large sections thereof, could’ve appeared in Bananafish magazine word-for-word as if it had been the year 1996 when Smith started painting on film at the age of 23 instead of 1946. To make it even more time-slippy, it was in Berkeley, California in 1946 that Smith starting painting on film and creating the series of short films that were later to be collected as his Early Abstractions, in the same San Francisco Bay Area in which the Bananafish collective were going to live and publish roughly 40 years later, and where Philip K. Dick not-so-incidentally graduated from Berkeley High School one year later in 1947.
But Bananafish magazine and Californian Time-Slips aside, we are here today to make notes towards the idea of an official soundtrack (or “OST”) to these Early Abstractions, aka Harry Smith’s Film Nos. 1-5, 7, and 10. (Szwed: “Nos. 6 and 8 survive in fragments or poor condition, and No. 9 is lost . . .”) The premise of an “official” soundtrack to the Early Abstractions films may be inherently ill-advised, because Smith himself would soundtrack the films in different ways over the years, the possibilities being theoretically infinite due to his “automatic synchronization” concept. (More on that in a moment.) He also wrote of his films, “they were first meant to be silent,” but as Szwed adds: “Harry was keenly attuned to questions about soundtracks for films: What films should be silent? What was a soundtrack supposed to accomplish? What kind of music should be used? . . . Harry’s own first films were silent, he said, because he couldn’t afford to pay for the transfer of music to optical soundtracks or for producing sound prints for commercial distribution.”
There certainly were financial barriers, but I think Smith very intentionally wanted to keep the films silent, the same way he gave the films numbers instead of titles. If there is an “official” soundtrack to the Early Abstractions, perhaps it is indeed silence. Regarding whether or not his films should have titles, Smith said “I still feel that giving them specific titles is destructive because it tensions them to specific emotions.” Tensioning the films to specific music could have a similar effect, and if the “official” soundtrack is silence, but music does happen to be played along with the films at certain screenings, it would be allowed to vary and happen organically from place to place, rather than be locked to any one single piece.
Indeed, when the films were screened in public, even if they were initially meant to be silent, it wasn’t long before Smith would play records from his own collection along with them. Thus, the films would have an OST, selected by the filmmaker himself, at least for that evening, but as it turned out, sometimes for months and even years. The closest thing to an ongoing OST during the 1950s and 1960s was music by Dizzy Gillespie. Szwed: “When [Smith] first considered using sound with his early films, he thought of Bach, but then he heard jazz while stoned and began using Dizzy Gillespie’s records.”
There also seems to have been an eventual OST shift somewhere in the middle of Smith’s career from songs by Dizzy Gillespie to songs by the Beatles and the Fugs, though ultimately it didn’t matter, because according to Smith’s concept of “automatic synchronization,” the official soundtrack could literally be anything, at anytime. “His experience with different forms of music often led him to choose soundtracks by means of chance . . . Harry settled on what he called ‘automatic synchronization’ – the use of any form of music with any of his films.” There had been a precedent when Jean Cocteau used the phrase “accidental synchronization” to describe the scores of his films and ballets in the 1930s and 1940s; Smith, likely having read about this, changed the phrase to “automatic synchronization” because “in Harry’s view there were no accidents – everything could go with everything . . . Harry’s intention was to never try to make the film completely sync up with the music rhythmically. Though Harry did sometimes adjust the speed of the projector to match the tempo of some music, he still insisted that automatic synchronization was real, and implied that there was a rhythmic universal.”
I encourage you to experiment with automatic synchronization and the rhythmic universal by using the embedded YouTube of Early Abstractions below. Make sure the video is muted, and then open it full screen while continuing to listen to whatever you’re already listening to. Or pick any piece of music that you’d like to see automatically synchronize with Smith’s films, and start the music and the video at the same time. I’m going to bet it goes well. In fact, it usually goes so well it’s hard not to wonder. Is there a specific technique Smith used in the way the films are designed and edited? Is there indeed a rhythmic universal? Is Harry Smith some sort of rogue scientist trickster wizard?
Well duh, yeah, but there are two passages written by Smith that, however cryptic, point towards a further understanding of the first two non-wizard questions. There’s this, from a 1951 letter from Smith to his one-time benefactor Hilla von Rebay: “In the true non-objective films of the future, non-objectivity of motion, trajectory, and rhythm will be just as important as non-objectivity of form-relation, and this is impossible if the film composer has music in mind rather than his own soul which is nourished by silence and light.” My interpretation is that, if the motion and the edits within the film are being created according to predetermined tempos and rhythms, the result will be a such a particular cadence that it will be too strict to allow non-objectivity, and therefore any other cadences. But, if the motion and edits only refer to the cadence of “soul” and “silence and light,” then there will be a non-objectivity of cadence, and all cadences, including cadences within cadences, will be applicable.
There are also these notes by Smith from Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue 3 (1965): “All these works have been organized in specific patterns derived from the interlocking beats of the respiration, the heart and the EEG alpha component and should be observed together in order, or not all, for they are valuable works, works that will live forever . . .” If he’s making his films with an awareness of the internal rhythms and cross-rhythms of human life itself, then it’s no wonder that every single movement in his films will hit as just another syncopation within the universal rhythm. This also seems to correlate with the late Milford Graves’s work with heartbeats and rhythms and his postulation that a somewhat irregular heartbeat shows more vitality than a regular heartbeat. (For much more on the deep musicological and cardiological research of Milford Graves, watch the documentary film Milford Graves Full Mantis from 2018, directed by Jake Meginsky and Neil Cloaca Young.) Rani Singh explains further in Think of the Self Speaking: “He had a theory that the time of the movement would be a crosscurrent of the alpha rhythm, certain kinds of brain waves, the average heartbeat pattern, certain biological rhythms and crosscurrents in the human body, and he was animating his collages and setting the time according to archetypal body rhythms.”
So it’s something to do with all of that. As for what music did end up getting used most frequently, which is to say the closest thing to an OST, Szwed details Smith’s post-Gillespie trajectory thusly: “Years later, he updated the music by using a Fugs record, and once asked if the punk band False Prophets would record a soundtrack for him. But he settled on the Beatles, as he was a serious fan, and used songs such as ‘Please Please Me’ and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.’” I wasn’t familiar with the False Prophets, and as far as I can tell there’s no record of their music actually being used during an Early Abstractions screening. Discogs says they’re an “American Punk Rock / Hardcore band from New York City,” so it checks out that Smith would’ve been aware of them. Maybe they were neighbors. The False Prophets did release a full-length LP in 1986 on the venerable Alternative Tentacles label, and I just tried their tracks “Overkill” (barely a minute long) and “Somebody React” (a minute and 30 seconds) as a soundtrack to Film No. 1 and it worked exceptionally well (even if running about 15 seconds too long).
I could be wrong about this, but my sense is that he didn’t really settle on using the Beatles until the 1980s, so a rough trajectory could be Dizzy Gillespie from the 1950s and into the 1960s, then the Fugs at some point in the 1960s (their Smith-produced debut LP was released in 1965) and into the 1970s, and then finally settling on the Beatles sometime in the 1980s, this False Prophets dalliance aside. It’s actually surprising that in this long period of time (almost 40 years of screenings!) and given the freedom offered by automatic synchronization that there aren’t more specific examples of music used by Smith for the Early Abstractions. The only other one I can find in Cosmic Scholar is on page 120, where Szwed quotes the Art in Cinema program for April 27, 1951: “Three Dimensional Films by Harry Smith . . . There will be four short subjects. They will be projected both with synchronized sound track(s) of Balinese, Hopi, and Yorouba [sic] music, and also accompanied by modern instrumentalists and a vocalist improvising directly from the visual stimuli. (By permission of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation).”
Surely Smith chose more music over the years than just Dizzy Gillespie, the Fugs, and the Beatles, but it just doesn’t seem to be documented. There is, however, one great story that was told by Fred Camper somewhere on the internet, and excerpted by Szwed on pages 97 and 98 of Cosmic Scholar, about his attending a 1972 seminar with Harry Smith in the Chelsea Hotel. “[He] started by passing out joints, suggesting a toke was necessary to get in the proper mood.” Then, “At one point he explained automatic synchronization, and preparing to show one of his films to demonstrate it, pointed at me, as I was sitting on the floor near a stack of records, and said, “Hey, you, pick a record, any record.” Without looking . . . I passed the first record on the stack up to him. He looked at it and said, “You idiot, not that record.” I handed another record up to him, and he looked at it, and said, “You moron, not that record!” Finally the third record was acceptable, and he played it while showing a film he was working on.”
Even though the first two records Camper picked would have still worked as a soundtrack, thanks to the principles of automatic synchronization, Smith’s behavior makes it clear that some choices are just going to be better than others. There is indeed accounting for taste, especially when the music is accompanying such a rarefied and magical work of art as a film by Harry Smith. The Beatles or Dizzy Gillespie are going to be superior choices to Mantovani or Nickleback, and so on.
But of course, anyone can try their own soundtrack at any time. For the YouTube of Early Abstractions embedded below, the uploader chose Don Cherry, Tod Dockstader, Edith Frost, Supersilent, and Sun Ra, and it all works perfectly, of course. This specific YouTube is noted by Szwed on page 97 of Cosmic Scholar, as well as another example of a spontaneous modern OST: “At Naropa University in 1989, students tried different types of music with Harry’s Early Abstractions films, including Enrico Caruso, the Butthole Surfers, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, and tracks from his Anthology of American Folk Music, and all seemed to work with them. If anything could work with anything, why not several anythings?” Go ahead, try it yourself:
Harry Smith’s EARLY ABSTRACTIONS Numbers 1-5, 7 & 10 © 1941-57 Harry Smith & Anthology Film Archives. Video edition © 1987 Mystic Fire Video, Inc. The music printed onto this 1987 Mystic Fire videocassette edition is “Shaman” by Teiji Ito © 1986 Cherel Ito, which the author has not heard (having been replaced in the YouTube embedded above), but would assume works fine according to aforementioned principles of automatic synchronization. However, because Ito had a long working relationship with another great underground filmmaker, Maya Deren, and is already strongly associated with her as a soundtrack composer, the author thinks there could’ve been more interesting and Smith-appropriate choices made, such as those detailed below. That said, Mystic Fire may not have had the budget to buy the rights to a few Dizzy Gillespie songs, let alone a few by the Beatles. And remember, the true OST is “silence and light” after all. (For the record, had I been in charge of the Mystic Fire edition, I would’ve released it with no music or sound.)
Film No. 1 (2:19) (YouTube timestamp: 0:13 – 2:32). Created 1946-1948 in Berkeley, California at 5½ Panoramic Way. Smith: “Hand-drawn animation of dirty shapes – the history of the geologic period reduced to orgasm length. (Approx. 5 min.)” Later retitled A Strange Dream. Szwed: “The film was silent, until he later used Dizzy Gillespie’s Latin jazz recording of “Manteca” (“lard” in Spanish, “Marijuana” in Afro-Cuban slang) as a soundtrack. It was the first of three Dizzy Gillespie Latin jazz works that added to the soundtrack an extra layer of Cuban rhythmic complexity on top of jazz’s already dense rhythms.” The other two were “Algo Bueno” and “Guarachi Guaro” as referenced below. One should keep in mind that Smith was probably not changing records perfectly in sync with each film change. For example, the most common RCA Victor recording of “Manteca” is 3:06 and film is 2:19. Was Smith just lifting up the needle and starting the song over for that last 47 seconds? Or letting it run into the next song? Probably all of that and also things even more random and casual. I think the best three songs for Film No. 1 are “Manteca” by Dizzy Gillespie, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” by the Beatles, and “Supergirl” by the Fugs. Szwed: “Years later, he updated the music by using a Fugs record . . . but he settled on the Beatles, as he was a serious fan, and used songs such as “Please Please Me” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” For Film No. 1 both “Supergirl” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” are terrific. The lusty words, singing, and playing of both songs have quite sexual overtones that are wildly and indeed somewhat magically amplified by Smith’s imagery, which all certainly jives with his notes: “Hand-drawn animation of dirty shapes – the history of the geologic period reduced to orgasm length. (Approx. 5 min.)” The Beatles’s “Please Please Me” works very well too. “Manteca” by Dizzy Gillespie seems to have been Smith’s choice, but it’s quite a bit longer than the film, and was also used by Smith for Film No. 4 while “I Want to Hold Your Hand” is almost the perfect length. And finally, as I mentioned above, Smith wanted to use the obscure NYC punk band False Prophets at one point, and “Overkill” and “Somebody React” played back-to-back as they appear on their self-titled debut LP from 1986 work extremely well (if 15 seconds too long) for Film No. 1. It may be a long way from Dizzy Gillespie, but punk music always goes extremely well with Smith’s films. (Or 1940s bebop was just also NYC punk.)
Film No. 2 (2:11) (YouTube timestamp: 2:32 – 4:43). Made 1946-1949 in Berkeley, California. “Algo Bueno” by Dizzy Gillespie is the only song associated with this film in any official Smith-era capacity. (See notes for Film No. 3 for more, but not much more.) But, if you’re using the Fugs or the Beatles for Film No. 1, whatever song you didn’t use will go great here. For example, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “Please Please Me” are a killer back-to-back OST for Film Nos. 1 & 2.
Film No. 3 (3:20) (YouTube timestamp: 4:43 – 8:03). Szwed: “Harry’s films No. 2 and No. 3 were made between 1946 and 1949, and were again hand-painted batiked animation. There was no soundtrack to either, but he later synchronized No. 2 to Dizzy Gillespie’s recording of ‘Algo Bueno’ (the film was later retitled by others Message from the Sun) and No. 3 (retitled Interwoven) to Gillespie’s recording of ‘Guarachi Guaro.’” Or again, substitute Fugs or Beatles to your liking.
Film No. 4 (2:56 or 3:04) (YouTube timestamp: 8:02 – 10:58 or 11:06). Smith: “Black and white abstractions of dots and grillworks made in a single night. (Approx. 6 min.)” Szwed: “It was in 16-millimeter, black and white, and color, and silent, though intended to be again used with Dizzy Gillespie’s “Manteca,” and in fact the film opens with a brief camera scan of some details of Smith’s 1949-1950 painting in color of the music of the Gillespie recording before turning to black and white.” Later retitled Fast Track. The author swears that when he viewed Film No. 4 at a student screening on the University of Nebraska campus in Lincoln circa 1994, the soundtrack was “Tomorrow Never Knows” by the Beatles. The length of the Beatles song and the Smith film are almost exactly the same, and syncing them now I’m getting serious déjà vu back to that day in the Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center, right down to specific dots in specific places on the screen flashing during specific tape-loop flourishes. I think “Tomorrow Never Knows” works beautifully, and if I’m right, someone must’ve printed it on that particular 16mm reel, but of course “Manteca” should probably be the primary choice when the film opens with a scan of a painting Smith made to the song, and the song’s running time of 3:06 syncs even more perfectly to the extended black runout that exists on the videotape. Unrelated to the OST, I’d like to add that the switch to color at the 2:16 mark (approx. 10:18 on the Early Abstractions video embedded above) is magnificent and really gets me every time. Also love that this film was made in a single night, a story Jordan Belson tells well to interviewer Scott McDonald in the book A Critical Cinema 3, excerpted by Szwed in Cosmic Scholar.
Film No. 5 (2:02) (YouTube timestamp: 11:06 –13:08). Made 1949-1950, Berkeley, California. Smith: “Color abstraction. Homage to Oskar Fischinger’—a sequel to No. 4. (Approx. 6 min.). Szwed “…a silent film…” These remaining three films don’t really have any favored music by Smith attached to them at all. Did Smith mostly just show them silently? The author thinks Jefferson Airplane’s “Embryonic Journey” works very nicely with Film No. 5, especially with the ‘wheels within wheels’ imagery Smith employs in the first half of the film. It’s a very short film, the shortest of all the surviving Early Abstractions, but “Embryonic Journey” still ends about 10 seconds too early, and it’s actually beautiful to watch the film’s final images play out silently.
Film No. 7 (4m25s) (YouTube timestamp: 13:08–17:33). Begun in 1950, probably started in Berkeley and finished in New York City. Smith: “Optically printed Pythagoreanism in four movements supported on squares, circles, grillworks and triangles with an interlude concerning an experiment.” Szwed seems to say that the “experiment” Smith is referring to was “a fifteen-minute silent film he titled Color Study.” The shuffle-played song on Sp****y that was just now playing along with Film No. 7 was “Umbilical Cord Blood” by Fire-Toolz, a glitchy electronic queer hyperpop instrumental released in 2021, and it worked absolutely perfectly. Unfortunately, it’s almost a full minute too short – adventurous programmers may be willing to let the final 53 seconds play out silently, but I think it needs music. Would Smith not have welcomed the post-iPod “shuffle all” feature as a live soundtracking tool for his films? The ultimate proof of automatic synchronization? In this case, shuffle ordained that the last 53 seconds of the film would be soundtracked by the first 53 seconds of “L.A.” by the Fall, which was great, of course. Aaaaaand now it’s a few weeks later and Film No. 7 is going remarkably well with a live version of “Sex Bomb Baby” by Flipper. Again, Smith films always seem to go well with punk, whether it’s the Fall, the False Prophets, Flipper, the Fugs, or some other band whose name doesn’t even start with the letter F.
Film No. 10 (3m32s) (YouTube timestamp: 17:34 – 21:06). Szwed: “No. 10, the first of what he called his ‘Mirror Animations,’ was a 16-millimeter, color, silent film.” Smith: “An exposition of Buddhism and the Kabbalah in the form of a collage.” Images cut out of magazines, newspapers, and catalogs. It’s been really fun for me to put literally any music to this film and have it work great. Tonight it was Side D of the Motion Sickness of Time Travel self-titled 2LP from 2012 on Spectrum Spools.