Nov 4
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Harry Smith’s Film #18, Mahagonny
(1970-80, 16mm, presented on 35mm, 2 hours, 21 minutes)
This screening kicks off screenings of Harry Smith’s films all over the city: “Heaven and Earth Magic” at the LA County Museum of Art, Saturday Nov. 10, 7:30 pm
and
Alchemical Dreams: The Short Films of Harry Smith at REDCAT, November 26, 2007, 8:00 pm
“You have to live Mahagonny, in fact be Mahagonny in order to work on it.”
— Harry Smith
Experimental filmmaker, anthropologist, painter, and musicologist Harry Smith’s final film was an epic four-screen projection titled Mahagonny. Smith worked on this cinematic transformation of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny for over ten years and considered it his magnum opus. His friends have said that Smith was obsessed with the opera, playing it over and over in his room at the Chelsea Hotel. The film was shot from 1970 to 1972 and edited for the next eight years.
The “program” of the film is meticulous, with a complex structure and order. The Weill opera is transformed into a numerological and symbolic system. Images in the film are divided into categories— portraits, animation, symbols and nature— to form the palindrome P.A.S.A.N.A.S.A.P. Mahagonny is an allegory of contemporary life; it explores the needs and desires of man amid the rituals of daily life in New York City. Smith’s New York, like Mahagonny, is a place where everything is permitted and the only sin is not having enough money. Much of the film takes place within the Chelsea Hotel. The film contains invaluable cameos of important avant-garde figures such as Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith, and Jonas Mekas, intercut with installation pieces from Robert Mapplethorpe’s studio, New York City landmarks of the era, and Smith’s visionary animation. Smith’s portrait of life in New York has strong affinities with the Brecht/Weill opera. Both are set in a somewhat mythical America, meant to exemplify life in capitalist society more generally.
The opera caused a riot when it premiered in Leipzig, Germany, in 1930. Smith’s selection of the opera was prompted by his desire to create a similarly radical effect, although his Mahagonny provoked no mass demonstrations when it was screened in New York.Smith identified with Weill’s transformation of popular music into an avant-garde presentation, and an analogy can be made between Weill’s work and Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (1952). For the Anthology, Smith took existing commercial recordings of traditional American folk music and reshaped them into a complex aural collage. Like Weill’s opera and the Anthology, Mahagonny blurs the line between “high” and “low,” traditional form and radical production, taking vernacular elements out of their original context to create a work that addresses many areas of culture that Smith had been investigating for over thirty years.The editing of Mahagonny was a byzantine process. Smith created index cards for each scene and organized them according to various mathematical permutations in relation to the opera.
Twenty-four scenes appear on each reel, following the order of the palindrome. Smith determined the length of each scene by taking into account certain constants in the viewer such as respiration and heartbeat. To synchronize the four screens with the operatic score, he made scrolls representing each edited reel plus a fifth scroll with the time code and list of scenes from the opera. The completed film consists of four 16 mm images tiled together on the screen to form one four-part image synced to the opera.The film has had limited exposure, showing only six times in 1980 at Anthology Film Archives in New York with Smith present at each screening. His desire was to have it presented on four pool tables within a boxing ring but that was never realized. Smith designed frame filters within which the film would be projected accompanied by scrolling subtitles of the opera, but that project also never came to fruition.
This screening represents the completion of an ambitious preservation project by the Harry Smith Archives with the assistance of Anthology Film Archives. The artist’s original intention was to screen the film with four 16mm projectors. While we have duplicated and printed the 16mm elements, we have made a radical departure in transferring the 16mm screen sections to a single 35mm film in order to make it easier for the film to be exhibited. The original 16mm film masters have been optically printed onto a single ‘tiled’ 35mm film negative.
-- Rani Singh, Harry Smith Archives
Harry Smith’s Description of Film #18, Mahagonnybeing a Mathematical analysis of Duchamp’s “La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même” expressed in terms of Kurt Weill’s score for “Aufstieg Und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny” with contrapuntal images (not necessarily in order) derived from Brecht’s libretto for the latter work.
For more than four years I have been working on a film version of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s magnum opus, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, a parody of life in America. I selected Mahagonny as a vehicle for two reasons. First, because despite the complexity of repetition in the twenty-one songs in the opera, there are sections that approximate the sounds of both those musical cultures that select melody as their fundamental trait and those which use rhythm as the point for development. Second, because the story is simple and widespread; the joyous gathering together of a great number of people, the breaking of the rules of liberty and love, and consequent fall into oblivion.My photography has not been directed toward making a “realistic” version of the opera, but rather toward translating, as nearly as I can, of images of the German text into universal, or near universal, symbols and synchronizing the appropriate images with music.These images consist of about 250 categories such as eggs breaking, plants growing, rain falling, fire burning, parts of the human body and even scenes of the city. About half the footage consists of animation of one sort or another. The animation is based mostly on the fundamental symbols found in all art such as the circle or dots. The emotional connotations of objects moving toward, past, or away from the spectator, or things suddenly forming or dissolving, have also been utilized.
This method has been followed in order that the final film will be just as intelligible to the Zulu, the Eskimo, or the Australian Aborigine as to people of any other cultural background or age.In it’s final form the film will be a series of scenes of varying lengths synchronized to the time of an entire song, and on occasion, synchronized to the length of a single line of the lyrics, but all designed to translate the opera into a universal script based on the similarities of life and aspiration in all humans. As far as I know, the attempt to make a film for all people, whether they be Papuans or New Yorkers, has not been so far made. It is by far the most complex of the 20 or so films I have made in the last 30 years; and my hope is that it will not only be successful, but will introduce a new theoretical basis for films and through the use of worldwide symbols help to bring all people of the Earth closer together.
The photography, more than 11 hours of raw material, was completed in July of 1972. The film has been edited to six hours of useable footage, which is presented in a four screen projection in a recombinant fashion in a two hour and twenty-one minute presentation which is synchronized to the Brecht/Weill opera.The final stage of editing will involve filming colored patterns created with hand cut slides and filters, which will then be superimposed on the shots selected from the original means of A, B, and C rolling. The shots will be edited according the certain mathematical permutations, in multiples of 12, so that the emotional connotations of the various categories correspond to the natural emotional pulse of the observer.-- Harry Smith’s grant application to the American Film Institute, July 12, 1974
Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny
Score by Kurt Weill, Libretto by Bertolt Brecht
Appendix: THE STORY
ACT I
An announcer introduces the scenes. During the period of the Great Depression, a battered truck breaks down in a desolate area somewhere in the U.S. Three fugitives from justice, Fatty, Trinity Moses and the Widow Begbick, get out. With nowhere else to go, they found a city on the spot – Mahagonny, the City of Nets (“So we’ll stay right here”). Here there will be amusement, while everywhere else there is labor and toil; a week here will be seven days without working. They put a table under a palm tree: the “Do As You Like Tavern” will be the city’s core.Soon the city thrives with transients and whores, among them Jenny (Alabama song: “Oh, show us the way to the next whiskey bar”). News of a paradise spreads (“We live here in the cities”). Discontents from all over pour into Mahagonny, including four loggers from Alaska – Jimmy Mahoney, Alaska Wolf Joe, Jacob and Moneybags Billy (“Off to Mahagonny”). The Widow Begbick welcomes the Alaskans, offering them whores, including her best new girl, Jenny, who holds Jacob at bay (“Stop and think awhile”). Jimmy chooses Jenny, and she breaks the ice (“Oh, Jimmy, now you’re really mine”).
But Mahagonny’s prosperity wanes. Nothing has been caught in the City of Nets. People are leaving, and with them money and the city’s lure (“Oh, all this Mahagonny”). Jimmy tries to leave because he has seen a sign forbidding something. He says he will do anything he likes – even eat his hat – but his friends calm him down and drag him back into town. At the bar, Jimmy’s frustration crescendos (“Deep in Alaska’s snow-covered forests”). Mahagonny is anything but a paradise – it is nothing, and a nothing on which he spent his hard-earned hopes and money. Mahagonny was built because there was nothing to rely on and too much peace; now it fails because everything is too regular, too dependable.A hurricane approaches (“Oh, dire threat of disaster... Brothers, be steadfast!”). In the night, Jimmy realizes that human happiness is based on lawlessness and amorality (“As you make your bed, you must lie there”).
ACT II
“If you want something, you must simply take it” – when the storm miraculously spares Mahagonny, the people adopt this motto. “First comes the greedy eating,” say the men, “then comes lovemaking, then the boxing matches, then booze.” The gluttonous Jacob blissfully eats himself to death (“I’ve just finished eating”). The Widow Begbick rushes men through the whorehouse (“Spit out your chewing gum now”). Jimmy and Jenny, watching passing cranes, notice wistfully their brief strength in togetherness (Crane duet: “See how those herons fly”). Next, Jimmy bets all he owns on Joe in a boxing match (“Now for the prize fight”) and loses when Joe is knocked dead by Trinity Moses. At the bar, everyone drinks (“Men in Mahagonny town”), and Jimmy’s fantasy of escape – he takes a billiard table for a storm-tossed boat home to Alaska – collapses when he “disembarks” in Mahagonny. What is more, he can’t pay for his drink or a broken billiard cue. No one will help him out, including Jenny, who advises everyone to look out for himself (reprise: “As you make your bed”).
ACT III
Jimmy, tied up and roped to a tree in the woods, dreads the coming day (“When the sky grows brighter”).In Mahagonny, the court of justice is like a theater (“Have all these people paid for their admission?”). Trinity Moses, the prosecuting attorney, sells tickets. A murderer is acquitted. When Jimmy Mahoney’s case comes up, he is sentenced: for lesser infringements, such as the seduction of Jenny and the singing of forbidden songs, he gets hard labor and jail, but for lack of money, the greatest of all crimes, he is summarily sentenced to death.Citizens of Mahagonny now dream of another city, Benares, as people once dreamed of Mahagonny (Benares song: “There is no money in this town”).
While Jimmy says good-by to everyone, he exhorts them to live the fullest while they can (“Let no man assure you”). He is electrocuted as the people enact a play about God coming to Mahagonny. They discover they are impervious to God’s threats of hell because they already live there (“One cold and gloomy afternoon”).The cost of living is now prohibitive. Giant processions herald Mahagonny’s end. The crowd’s placards show them at odds with life and one another. Jimmy’s coffin is borne in. “Cannot help a dead man,” is the chant. “Cannot help ourselves or you or anyone.”
From Mahagonny, A Sourcebook, edited by Joanna Lee, Edward Harsh, and Kim Kowalke (New York: Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, 1995).
For more information on Harry Smith please visit the Harry Smith Archives website. |
