Harry Smith’s Film #18, Mahagonny in 4K
Harry Smith’s Film #18, Mahagonny in 4K
Introduction by Hilary Staff, Harry Smith Archives.
Introduction by Hilary Staff, Harry Smith Archives.
“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, Mahagonny, was an epic four-screen projection. 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. Mahagonny explores the needs and desires of man amid the rituals of daily life in New York City. Much of the film takes place within the Chelsea Hotel and contains 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. 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; the original masters have been optically printed onto a single “tiled” 35mm film negative. This presentation is a new restoration of the film.
Programmed by Hyesung ii and K.J. Relth-Miller.
Note by Rani Singh, Harry Smith Archives.
Thanks to Rani Singh and Hilary Staff.
DIRECTED BY: Harry Smith. 1970–80. 141 min. USA. Color. 4K DCP.
Academy Museum film programming generously funded by the Richard Roth Foundation.
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