Heaven and Earth Magic

One of the less-noted luminaries of the beatnik/Bohemian undertow, HARRY SMITH was an artist of multiple mediums whose film index is chiefly comprised of animated short subjects which are now either lost or rarely screened, and this, his most celebrated work, released in 1962. The stark black and white feature is a jittering collage of 19th Century newsprint snippets which swirl and cavort upon a black expanse. As the images interact, amalgamate, and transmogrify in their jerky ebb and flow, they conduce to a colorless kaleidoscope of defamiliarized objects which vivify in gelastic, absurreal ways. The visuals are punctuated strangely by disconsonant stock audio effects.

Iconographically alluring at first, HEAVEN AND EARTH MAGIC gets a bit repetitious by the 20 minute mark, and seeing it through to the end is a moonshot for a dauntless few. Still and all, it's an admirably figmental and singular cinematic unicorn, and its stylistic flourishes inspired a minor movement in commercial art which was observable into the early 70s.

6.5/10. Rather distended at feature length, but a cultural relic of Bohemian artistic exploration which is truly one and of itself.

That's essentially what can be said to best describe "Heaven and Earth Magic", magnum opus of the avant-garde animator Harry Smith. An unforgettable collection of visuals, this film is said by many to have an actual storyline, but because of the lack of coherency in presenting this storyline, it is best to go into the film without the expectations of a modern piece of narrative cinema. That basically means allow yourself to be swept into the cascade of images Smith presents, and don't worry about understanding a plot. It's really not one that you would be able to discern within the film without already knowing it ahead of time; so with that said, one should allow themselves to be transported into that other universe Smith wants you to feel and forget all else.

"Heaven and Earth Magic" was one of Harry Smith's rare feature-length films at a little over an hour, and that's understandable when you consider his style(s). I say this in plural because when watching his filmography, one can see the man made use of two different forms of animation: cartoon (hand-painted onto 35mm film) and cutout. The former was his earliest style, while the latter was his later one. Hence, considering this was made in 1962, it is through cutout imagery that Smith tells his strange tale, one about a woman who has a toothache that travels to Heaven instead of the dentist's and experiences a series of surrealistic occurrences. As stated above, this story is not told in any conventional sense to be sure, and it is only through a few recurring objects that you can see this happening.

Smith's previous animation shorts were normally less than five minutes, and consisted of similar visuals to the ones in this film. One can definitely see why this was his only feature film, because despite the 'plot' that explains some of the action, it's really no more than a lot of surreal cutout animation. The weird things that happen are one after the other, with a lot of - as my title states - recurring motifs. A skeleton, an umbrella, birds...the list goes on and on. These things are often accompanied by sound effects that sort of fit in, but certainly don't sync with the animation, further enhancing the experience. It's all very artistic, beautifully crafted, and does a great job at painting an alternate dimension - as the title indicates, it's magical.

The thing about Heaven and Earth Magic is the sound design from Harry Smith was more unnerving and queasy than the visuals; the discord among the various cries, wails, barking, the calm of the wind, baby cries and horns and the general industrial cacophony is what makes this so entrancing. Smith reminds us that when you have noise put to visuals it is what makes everything so completely untethered to reality even as these are things that had to be hand crafted and shaped from reality.

You are caught up in what is essentially set pieces about building up and breaking down shapes and people, how some will consume and some will create and some will take away just as quickly. There is no rhyme or reason to anything but there is some sort of dream logic going on, like when the one guy who swallows a helper then gets his eye injected with a needle that makes it bug out.

Some of this - no who are we kidding most of of it - is nonsense and experimentation in shifting around shapes and figures and so on. But I'd be lying if I said I didnt get more into it the longer it went on. I figured this would get tiresome as this pre Terry Gilliam Monty Python approach to cut-out random silliness built and changed over time. What I didn't expect was that I'd want to see what happened to that... watermelon-head guy or if that fish would make a move on that girl.

Drama, man!

Over "Heaven and Earth Magic"'s brief 66 minute long runtime, my personal score for the film went from a 9 to an 8 to a 7 to a 6. This unfortunate spiral downwards is due to its painstaking tediousness. While this film is a unique, fascinating, and surreal cinematic voyage that takes the viewer to a magical world unlike any other, it simply over welcomes its stay. This would be an amazing short film, but instead Harry Smith felt the need to drag it on and on despite how uneventful it was. Also, I had a real petpeeve with the amount of dropping water in this movie. My bathroom sink has been acting up lately and will not stop dropping. Drip-drop, drip-drop. It makes me want to flee the country, and this movie had to inject itself with that annoying noise and visual constantly. By the end, I was shaking with anger the second that visual/audio combo ungraceful exposed itself upon my screen.

You know what, this little experiment actually doesn't even deserve a 6/10. I'm bringing the score down to a 5. This film may be highly influential and unique, but it's damn annoying and tedious after a while, despite its runtime being barely over an hour.

US 66m, B&W Director: Harry Everett Smith

Heaven and Earth Magic is a surreal film fantasy using collage animation with late 19th century graphic images which are reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's animation work with Monty Python. Lacking any semblance of a plot, logic or narrative direction, Heaven and Earth Magic apparently follows the journey of a woman with a toothache to heaven and back, but not after the loss of a watermelon. The film's dreamlike action employs a series of related images and motifs related to death, including skeletal figures of humans and other animals. Visually interesting, for about fifteen minutes, I get the feeling that Heaven and Earth Magic might best be "understood" with the aid of some mind altering substance (Klaus Ming July 2013).