Heaven and Earth Magic

I first saw this at a Harry Smith tribute in '93 at the Naropa Institute. I was blown away. This film is avant-guarde. The animation is mind boggling and the use of sound is unforgettable. You will find yourself looking at the world in a very different way after this film. It's very much like Paradjanov in the use of symbols and allegory. Watching Heaven & Earth is like being exposed to a magical universe. A world you've forgotten that you actually already know.

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).

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!

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.

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.