MAHAGONNY
Harry Everett Smith | USA | 1980 | 141m
Experimental filmmaker, anthropologist, painter, and musicologist Harry Smith worked on Mahagonny, his final film, for over ten years. Obsessed with Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, Smith would play it over and over in his room at the Chelsea Hotel.
Mahagonny transforms the caustically satirical opera into an allegory of contemporary life, inter-cutting portraits of important avant-garde figures (including Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg, and Jonas Mekas), New York City landmarks, and Smith's visionary animation.
Shot from 1970 to 1972 and edited for the next eight years, the film also translates the Weill opera into a numerological and symbolic system derived from a mathematical analysis of Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass. Infinitely complex and equally rewarding, Mahagonny is a virtuosic assemblage and a work of true originality.
Harry Smith (1923-1991) was an American filmmaker, painter, musicologist, ethnographer, collector, and mystic. Smith is best known as the compiler of the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), which served as a catalyst and influential source for the folk revival of the 1960s. Appreciation also has grown for his contributions as an experimental filmmaker and painter. An autodidact and polymath whose eccentric but innovative artistic pursuits and collecting are legendary, he was one of the most colourful multidisciplinary artists of the 20th century.
