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Harry’s magnum opus Mahagonny (1980) will be screening this Sunday, November 16th, at the Mighty Niagara Film Fest!
Experimental filmmaker, anthropologist, painter, and musicologist Harry Smith’s final film was an epic four-screen projection titled Mahagonny. Smith worked on this cinematic transformation of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny for over ten years and considered it his magnum opus. His friends have said that Smith was obsessed with the opera, playing it over and over in his room at the Chelsea Hotel. The film was shot from 1970 to 1972 and edited for the next eight years. The “program” of the film is meticulous, with a complex structure and order. The Weill opera is transformed into a numerological and symbolic system. Images in the film are divided into categories— portraits, animation, symbols and nature— to form the palindrome P.A.S.A.N.A.S.A.P.
A short introduction will be provided by Henry Adam Svec. He is the author of American Folk Music as Tactical Media, a scholarly monograph, and Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs, a novel. He is also a recent contributor to The Occult Harry Smith: The Magical and Alchemical Work of an Artist of the Extremes. His interdisciplinary work has also spanned performance, music, theatre, criticism, and game design. He was raised on a cherry farm near Blenheim, Ontario, and has lived in New Brunswick and Mississippi. He currently teaches at the University of Waterloo.
11/16/2025