Psychoactive Cinema: Sacred Animations
Psychoactive Cinema is an exploration of experimental film, guided by the twin lights of entheogenic awakening and yogic-meditative transformation. In this installment, we offer a humble sample of seminal work by three “color music” artists who met and mutually influenced each other in California during the mid-twentieth century: Harry Smith, James Whitney, and Jordan Belson.
Harry Smith, No. 10 and No. 11 (1956-57)
Harry Smith (1923-1991): animator, painter, musicologist, anthropologist, linguist, hermeticist. A visionary and adventurous polymath. Among music aficianados, he’s best known as the man behind Folkways’ 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, six albums compiled from Smith’s personal collection of rare 78s from the 1920s and ‘30s (the Carter Family, Charlie Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, the Memphis Jug Band, et cetera, et cetera). He’s also known for his 1964 field recordings of the peyote songs of the Kiowa people of Oklahoma, issued by Folkways Records in 1973 as Kiowa Peyote Meeting. Among film nerds, he’s perhaps best known for Heaven and Earth Magic, number 12 in a decades-spanning series of cinematic experiments. In this series, films No. 10 and No. 11 may be of particular interest to Paisley Gate readers.
No. 10, in Smith’s own words: “An exposition of Buddhism and the Kaballa in the form of a collage. The final scene shows Aquatic mushrooms (not in No. 11) growing on the moon while the Hero and Heroine row by on a cerebrum.” (The original film was silent. If you find the added soundtrack to be unnecessary and annoying, as I do, then I’d suggest hitting the mute button.)
No. 11 is also known as Mirror Animations (the title for the above clip of No. 10 is incorrect, even though the two films are often discussed as a pair). Smith describes No. 11 as “a commentary on and exposition of No. 10” synchronized to “Misterioso” by Thelonius Monk. (Soundtrack essential. Do not mute.)
In Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-1978, P. Adams Sitney attempts a synopsis of Smith’s playful yet dense work:
“Both No. 10 and No. 11 are pointedly hermetic. They describe analogies among Tarot cards, Cabalistic symbolism, Indian chiromancy and dancing, Buddhist mandalas, and Renaissance alchemy. The process of animation itself, with its continual transformations, provides the vehicle for this giant equation ... A detailed description of these films, shot as they are, would require a volume ... there is a welter of images and symbols moving around or behind the central image at many points in the film. In short, Harry Smith is utilizing cinema’s potential, through its speed, to confound the perception of the spectator with a profusion of complex imagery.”
James Whitney, Yantra (1950s) and Lapis (1963-1966)
Sometime during the late ‘40s, Harry Smith met the brothers John (1917-95) and James Whitney (1921-82), two ambitious animators based in Los Angeles. According to P. A. Sitney, “Harry Smith credits the Whitneys both with teaching him the techniques of photographic animation and with helping him to formulate a theoretical view of cinema.” Early in their careers, the Whitney boys collaborated, before taking separate (yet intertwined) paths around 1945. John was the inventor, a pioneer in analog computers designed for animation, but James was the mystic, with a deepening interest in yoga that inspired his solo work. He discovered the dot pattern, a “structural mode ... which gives a quality which in India is called the Akasha, or ether, a subtle element before creation like the Breath of Brahma, the substance that permeates the universe before it begins to break down into the more finite world” (quoted in Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema). James spent a good chunk of the 1950s putting those dot patterns to work in the making of Yantra, an entirely hand-made film.
In the early ‘60s, James began work on Lapis, this time with the aid of a new computer which his brother helped construct and program, a computer which would have shaved years off the arduous production of Yantra. According to Gene Youngblood, the Lapis or “philosopher’s stone” is a meditation aid, i.e., the alchemist’s equivalent of the mandala, or perhaps the kasiṇa described by Buddhaghosa. Sitney, again, attempts to sum up an impossibly complex work of art:
“ … the most elaborate example of a mandala in cinema. It utilizes a field of tiny dots, symmetrically organized in hundreds of very fine concentric rings, to generate slowly changing intricate patterns which are most precise in the center of the wheel, disintegrating at the outer rings. The film consists of movements into the center of this wheel of dots, which at first expands beyond the borders of the frame, and movements away from it, showing its circular boundaries ... its elaborate movements belie a fundamental stasis.”
Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema provides us with some of Whitney’s most intriguing thoughts on art and spirituality:
"Only to a person who has expanded his consciousness is ordinary experience expanded. So it's exciting where art is going in this respect. Art and science are getting much closer to Eastern thought. But you'll always find those who seek to go beyond any language. Those are the people whose eyes and ears are really open. But they will come back, and they will be totally open and very sympathetic to what the artist is doing, but they won't have the energy to remain within that confine of art. Artists must in order to create. The other man will see art as the great play and fun that it is, but he won't be able to put that same sort of intensity into it as the artist does. The artist, in a sense, must keep a lot of ignorance. To stay in the world you have to preserve a certain amount of ignorance.”
Jordan Belson, Allures (1961) and Phenomena (1965)
Harry Smith lived in the Bay Area during the 1940s, and there he found a kindred spirit in Jordan Belson (1926-2011). Like Smith, Belson was a painter who turned to making films, thanks in large part to the Art in Cinema screenings held at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now SFMOMA) in the mid ‘40s. There, the “non-objective” films of Hans Richter and Norman McLaren “turned on” Belson and changed his creative life forever. Over a decade later, he collaborated with composer Henry Jacobs for the legendary Vortex Concerts at the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco. Allures developed out of images he was working with in these pioneering multimedia events. According to Sitney, “Belson acknowledges a debt to James Whitney as his instructor in the mandalic potential of the graphic film ... None of Belson’s early films are classical mandalas, but they all have the objective of being vehicles of meditation.” And according to Belson himself (quoted by Youngblood):
“It's a trip backwards along the senses into the interior of the being. It fixes your gaze, physically holds your attention ... I think of Allures as a combination of molecular structures and astronomical events mixed with subconscious and subjective phenomena—all happening simultaneously. The beginning is almost purely sensual, the end perhaps totally nonmaterial. It seems to move from matter to spirit in some way.”
Both Belson and Harry Smith were known for passing “through periods of extreme artistic withdrawal.” After Allures, Belson gave up filmmaking for a few years, and devoted himself to the practice of Hatha yoga. He returned with films like Re-Entry and Phenomena, both inspired by Buddhist ideas. Phenomena was inspired by the Heart Sutra and especially the Diamond Sutra. Its theme is the illusory nature of our phenomenal universe. Belson elaborates:
“It's seen with the blinders of humanity, you know, just being a human, grunting on the face of the earth, exercising and agonizing … The end of the film is the opposite of the beginning: it's still life on earth but not seen from within, as sangsara [Saṃsāra], but as if you were approaching it from outside of consciousness so to speak. From cosmic consciousness. As though you were approaching it as a god. You see the same things but with completely different meaning."
This, according to Youngblood, is the “substance” of Phenomena: the universe as samsara and as maya (“Sanskrit for a magical or illusory show”). This brings us full circle, back to the Cabalistic inspirations of Harry Smith, who, according to Sitney, regarded “his work in the historical tradition of magical illusionism, extending at least back to Robert Fludd who used mirrors to animate books, and Athanasius Kircher who cast spells with a magic lantern.” Many notable filmmakers, from Kenneth Anger to Ingmar Bergman, have joined Smith in embracing their place in this lineage which runs from the magic lantern to the movie projector. Bergman once wrote:
“I am either an imposter or, in the case where the audience is willing to be taken in, a conjurer. I perform conjuring tricks with a conjuring apparatus so expensive and so wonderful, that any performer in history would have given anything to own or make use of it.”
Although the trajectory of Belson’s work seems to be one of transcendence (from the sensual to the immaterial, from human to cosmic consciousness), Phenomena also points toward a more immanent approach, seemingly inevitable in discussions of Buddhism and psychedelics (and cinema)—what the poet Dale Pendell celebrated as “Makyō: the Path of Illusions; Path of Dreams.” This path blurs the lines between imposters, conjurers, artists, and bodhisattvas. Perhaps, as James Whitney suggested, even the spiritually-inclined artist “must keep a lot of ignorance.”
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