Automatic Synchronization: Music and Image in the Films of Harry Smith

Harry Smith has a secure place in the histories of experimental film and animation. From the 1940s to the 1960s, Smith produced a series of complex abstract animated films that used a number of direct film techniques, such as hand painting, batik and stencils. He also animated drawn and photographic images gleaned from a wide range books and magazines. These films have received acclaim and attention for their visual dynamism and the development of animation techniques, but the relationship of Smith’s films to the music that accompanied them is less often discussed, even if raises important questions about sound / image interaction and how audiences experience music and film when combined together. Smith’s extended explorations of his films in combination with a variety of music in different screening contexts were also directly influential, or at least prescient, of a number of later developments in audio-visual media presentation.

Music was a central part of Smith’s life and work. He received various honours for his musicological research His Anthology of American Folk Music, originally released in 1952 on the Folkways label as a six-album compilation, is regarded as a significant catalyst for the folk revival in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s and is still highly regarded today. Music was a key element in both the creation of Smith’s films and how music might be used for creating a continuously mutable framework for their reception. Smith dubbed a key method that he advanced throughout his filmmaking career as ‘automatic synchronization’, which he proposed for the particular utilisation of music to accompany his early, ostensibly silent, films (the collection released in 1965 under the title Early Abstractions). At its most basic level, ‘automatic synchronization’ consisted of taking a piece of music, playing it alongside any of his films and the rhythms of the images, and the music would ‘automatically’ synchronise. Although ostensibly the use of ‘automatic’ here refers to the idea that music will ‘always’ synch-up with the imagery in his films, I will argue that the term also refers to the idea of ‘automation’ as used by the surrealists: that chance procedures can bypass the controlling ego of the artist to connect with more elemental processes.