“I must say that I’m amazed, after having seen the black-and-white film (#12) last night, at the labor that went into it. It is incredible that I had enough energy to do it. Most of my mind was pushed aside into some sort of theoretical sorting of the pieces, mainly on the basis that I have described: First, I collected the pieces out of old catalogues and books and whatever; then made up file cards of all possible combinations of them; then, I spent maybe a few months trying to sort the cards into logical order. A script was made for that. All the script and the pieces were made for a film at least four times as long. There were wonderful masks and things cut out. Like when the dog pushes the scene away at the end of the film, instead of the title “end” what is really there is a transparent screen that has a candle burning behind it on which a cat fight begins—shadow forms of cats fighting. Then, all sorts of complicated effects; I had held these off. The radiations were to begin at this point. Then Noah’s Ark appears. There were beautiful scratchboard drawings, probably the finest drawings I ever made—really pretty. Maybe 200 were made for that one scene. Then there’s a graveyard scene, when the dead are all raised again. What actually happens at the end of the film is everybody’s put in a teacup, because all kinds of horrible monsters came out of the graveyard, like animals that folded into one another. Then everyone gets thrown in a teacup, which is made out of a head, and stirred up. This is the Trip to Heaven and the Return, then the Noah’s Ark, then The Raising of the Dead, and finally the Stirring of Everyone in a Teacup. It was to be in four parts. The script was made up for the whole works on the basis of sorting pieces. It was exhaustingly long in its original form.”
Harry Smith, quoted by P. Adams Sitney
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: 16mm Print
13 Feb 2005 11:22 PM | Comments (1)
I must see this movie.
Thomas
14 February 2005
6:02 AM
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