Harry Smith and Mahagonny

Summary

On March 20, 1980, Harry Smith's Mahagonny film opened at the screening auditorium of Anthology Film Archives located at 80 Wooster Street in Lower Manhattan. Less a screening than an underground performance by an avantgarde artist, the event was “staged” under Smith's supervision with four 16mm projectors running simultaneously in combinations he had designed in advance. Interchangeable gels were attached to the projectors and painted glass slides had been prepared but then not used to frame the images on the four screens set up in a square grid configuration at the front of the cinema. Two projectionists each oversaw twelve twenty-five-minute rolls of 16mm film, while Smith himself manipulated a spotlight with green, red, and yellow color filters as well as a sound tape with the German-language recording of the entire 1930 Brecht/Weill opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny that was synchronized manually with the projected images. Like his earlier, shorter films, this was conceived as a trance-inducing sound-and-light show, but never before had Smith produced such a long and complicated live spectacle. Symptomatically it is reported that he refused the offer of the Austrian avant-garde artist Peter Kubelka, who attended one of the original screenings, to open his film in Vienna because, so Smith explained, people there would understand the German opera libretto and thus be distracted from the overall effect. The screenings/performances were repeated several more times over the course of about two weeks. As one audience “witness” confirmed, Smith was so drunk and angry at one of the screening “performances” that he actually destroyed some of the glass plate slides he had prepared but didn't use. And others noted that he became increasingly agitated at each of the repeat screenings.

Harry Smith's epic Mahagonny is virtually unknown among Brecht and Weill scholars. The definitive catalogue listing radio, cinema, and television adaptations of Brecht's plays that accompanied a television retrospective on the occasion of his centenary in 1998 includes five Mahagonny films, but not Smith's. Roswitha Mueller's 1989 English-language monograph on Brecht and film theory, with its last chapter on Brecht reception in the cinema, also does not mention Smith. The Brecht Archive in Berlin, the clearinghouse of material and scholarship on Brecht, has no record of the film; neither does the Kurt Weill Foundation's “Sourcebook” on the opera include this cinematic adaptation.