The Wide Scope, Narrowed
The Wide Scope, Narrowed
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ShareThe next part of the book consists of two essays on Smith’s last formal film project, Film #18: Mahagonny, an ambitious split-screen affair based loosely on the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. Paul Arthur’s essay examines Smith’s film from a variety of perspectives: as an avant-garde “last film”; as an example of “paracinema” (Smith enjoyed interfering in various ways with the projection of his films, and wished Mahagonny to be projected onto four billiard tables enclosed in a boxing ring); as a “cinema of structure” (Smith’s interest in structuralism of various kinds being reflected in his use of symmetrical structures for his films); and as a representation of urban space. This last aspect connects Smith’s practice to those of flâneurs such as Charles Baudelaire, Georg Simmel, and Walter Benjamin, and also to the more recent “psychogeography” of Louis Aragon, Guy Debord, and Iain Sinclair. Rather than trace these mostly literary connections, Arthur looks to parallels in earlier films such as Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin, Ralph Steiner’s The City, and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, and contemporaneous cinema such as Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.
Musicologist Stephen Hinton focuses on Weill’s music, arguing convincingly that it is a more important reference point for Smith than Brecht’s libretto. Hinton locates the opera within a number of Weill’s “city pieces”, which, taken together, “amount to essays on the human condition… at once formed and endangered by the city”. Smith’s setting of the music to American imagery is a reminder that the specificity of the city in these texts is unimportant—Mahagonny was always a mythological site, a place set aside for the analysis of human nature, as in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village or Lars von Trier’s Dogville. Hinton sees in Mahagonny an attempt at “the musicalization of visual art”, citing Smith’s references to “contrapuntal images” and “rhythmic patterns”. This is an interesting idea and one that seems to set itself against the presentation of Smith (by Singh, amongst others) as someone who made films inspired by music. Perhaps, though, rather than looking for an antagonism here, we should take this as an opportune moment to remember Smith’s own multifaceted interests. It is possible, after all, to imagine him as someone who “saw” film musically and “heard” music visually.
The essays by Greil Marcus and Robert Cantwell which make up Part 4 of the book cover ground familiar to anyone with more than a passing interest in the Anthology of American Folk Music, or indeed with the work of these two writers (Cantwell’s essay has appeared before, in his If Beale Street Could Talk). Marcus delivers a piece steeped in hauntology and psychogeography as he tracks down the house in Berkeley where Smith lived and where he collected many of the records that would make up the Anthology. As well as being interested in ghosts (Smith’s ghost and those of the singers on the old 78s), Marcus takes up the issue of structure again. Smith’s quest for structure aimed for something more creative than the pedestrian categorization of “region, period, style, genre, instrumentation, song family, and, most of all, race”, seeking happenstantial correspondences instead.
Cantwell traces parallels between Smith and the romantic poets, quoting liberally from Keats and following a set of binarisms, from Coleridge’s imagination/fancy through Foucault’s spontaneity/reflection to his own mimesis/agency, in an attempt to “guess the Folkways Anthology into existence, listen it to life”. Those not convinced by Cantwell’s more extreme flights of poetic imagination may still find much of interest in his exemplary discussion of the recorded work. He deals excellently with the implications of recording for performance and vice versa and highlights the way in which we are aware that we are hearing the sound of records when we listen to the Anthology, the mediation of the medium always at the forefront of the musical aesthetic, always refusing transparency. At the summary, Cantwell makes a neat return to Keats, pointing out the proximity of the “wild heath” of the poems to the suburban home of the poet and noting a parallel in the constant nearness of the “old, weird America” (Marcus’s phrase for the territory that Smith’s project seems to map).
If the Anthology, as recorded object, represents a set-aside place, so too does the museum, as Thomas Crow reminds us in one of two chapters that make up the book’s final part, “Collage”. Crow’s focus is on the place (and particularly the exclusion) of American folk objects in museums and in US avant-garde visual art, at least that part of it selected for exhibition and critical appraisal. Despite an early promotion by the MOMA of folk objects, the artists celebrated in the ‘50s (such as Pollock and Rothko) represented a universal vision divorced from folk origins.
Crow places Smith’s early ‘50s collage work as a precursor to the return of folk and popular motifs in the avant-garde practice of Pop Artists such as Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Robert Rauschenberg. Stephen Fredman, meanwhile, examines Smith’s use of collage by comparing his work to that of three poets with whom he was associated, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, and Jack Spicer. Like these poets, Smith used collage to privilege “momentary conjunctions” over “fixed ideas”. Here, Smith the obsessive collector meets Smith the artist, or rather, Smith exemplifies the art of collecting, of “turning a collection into a work of art”.
This is an excellent, thought-provoking book, one that should appeal to anyone with an interest in the role of the vernacular in the contemporary arts. It is beautifully produced and contains numerous well-reproduced plates featuring Smith’s artwork. The labor of love that has gone into the look of the book is also evident in the rigorous editing of the essays. It seems as though, following her own observation about the elusiveness of the volume’s subject, Singh has sought to pin down the factual and verifiable within even the most anecdotal or speculative contributions. The text is generously studded with footnotes that are enlightening and reassuring rather than obtrusive.
As for the stated desire to bring together all the facets of Smith’s life and work, these essays succeed very well, though it should be noted that much of the book remains multidisciplinary rather than interdisciplinary. For all the rhetoric that abounds in the academy in praise of interdisciplinarity, there are still few figures who exemplify the practice quite like Harry Smith himself. This book comes very close, however, to being a faithful mirror of its fascinating subject and, like its subject, will provoke, educate, and entertain in equal measure.
