It is a duty, as well as a pleasure, to report on this excellent book published by a small press penalized by a rather limited distribution. Harry Smith (1923-1991) is one of the most hidden, obscure and enigmatic figures in the entire history of animation and the avant-garde. He gave interviews extremely rarely, and his interior universe was so foreign to the world of rationality and the everyday as to render dialogue with those near him almost always impossible. Nonetheless, his genius is recognized among the oldest to have practiced in our field: it's enough to remember the abstract feature Heaven And Earth Magic (1950-1960), even in the non-definitive versions which are in circulation, to have a measure of his poetic power.

A Little About the Man
Smith had an extraordinarily intricate and contradictory personality, dedicated to diverse disciplines. He was a painter, filmmaker, anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, occultist, alchemist, and collector of unusual objects. For instance, he assembled about 30,000 Ukrainian painted Easter eggs, with written annotations about each; filled 12 large boxes with paper airplanes which he finally donated to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington; and studied the languages, customs and religious ceremonies of the American Indians, and donated his collection of Indian artifacts to an ethnography museum in Sweden. In 1952, he published on Folkways Records an Anthology Of American Folk Music, which was the result of years of research, and, influencing musicians like Bob Dylan, was the basis of the boom in popular music in 1960s America.

Contrary to these constructive aspects however, Smith also fostered destructive tendencies. He didn't take care of his personal grooming or health; he ceaselessly re-edited his films without ever trying to establish a best version (`My films must be seen all together or not at all,' he used to say); he deliberately destroyed a large number of paintings and films and let his artistic patrimony be dispersed and plundered. Today Rani Singh, who was his assistant from 1988 until his death, heads a Harry Smith Archives, which is devoted to preserving the salvageable and recuperating all that can be found from the works of this genuine, if probably unwitting, American Surrealist.

A Little About the Book
The book American Magus is a work in progress. The editor, Paola Igliori is an Italian from Rome who has become a New Yorker by adoption. A student of art and an artist herself, she knew Harry Smith during the late `80s and was at his side at the moment of his death. She managed to collect some information from him and tried to understand the man and his works. As she wrote in the preface, "This book is only a scratching of the surface. It hopes to be direct, simple traces of Harry, a live map of different points of entrance in the labyrinth. I hope it will be a pathfinder for other more in-depth works." [Think of the Self Speaking: Selected Interviews of Harry Smith, a new book, has just been released this month and is reviewed in this issue as well.]