'Mahagonny' Tribute Features Songs & Talk From Patti Smith

[Lawrence French <lrfrench>]

'Mahagonny' Tribute Features Songs & Talk 
>From Patti Smith 

By Steve Hochman
(special to The Los Angeles Times) 


In a 1977 interview, New York art maverick Harry Smith
said that the best response to his final experimental
film "Mahagonny," then a work in progress, was "if the
audience goes to sleep." So you have to wonder what
Smith, who died in 1991 at age 68, would have made of
the events last week at the Getty Center's Harold M.
Williams Auditorium.

A restored version of the film was shown Thursday for
the first time since 1980, followed Friday by an
all-day symposium aimed at unraveling the knotty and
highly idiosyncratic work.  And capping it off was a
charmingly ramshackle performance by Patti Smith, one
of his most famous friends and proteges, who appears
briefly in the film. Accompanied by her son, Jackson,
on acoustic guitar, the art-punk icon topped off a few
readings and songs of her own with personalized
versions of three songs by composer Kurt Weill, who
with Bertolt Brecht wrote the savagely satirical 1930
opera "Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny," the
inspiration (and score) for the movie.

The film is a complexly woven series of images
arranged in four quadrants of the screen, somehow
impressionistically linking '70s Manhattan to the
lawless, doomed city of the Weill/Brecht opera. (The
complete recording of the famed 1956 version starring
Lotte Lenya serves as the soundtrack--all two hours
and 22 minutes of it, in German). And its structure,
Smith said, was derived from a mathematical analysis
of Marcel Duchamp's conceptual art piece "Large
Glass."

For the first part of the film, such images as New
York street scenes, women doing stylized tai chi-type
movements or making cat's cradles with string loops,
and patterns made in colored sand are flopped in
mirror images meeting in the middle. Later, each
quarter of the screen holds independent shots. It's
part kaleidoscope, part Rorschach, part cabalistic
ritual, created with obsessive attention to detail
over a 10-year period by a truly eccentric artist.

At Thursday's screening, some audience members did
fall asleep. Others grew fidgety, and some simply gave
up and left before it was done.

Even at Friday's symposium, experts as diverse as
Stanford University music department chair Stephen
Hinton, Duchamp authority David Joselit of UC Irvine
and critic Gary Indiana seemed confounded in trying to
find any direct parallels between the film and,
respectively, the original opera, "Large Glass" and
the social conditions of Weill's Weimar Republic and
Smith's Manhattan.

In her symposium talk, Patti Smith presented loving,
touching and humorous remembrances of the filmmaker
and the Chelsea Hotel, the Manhattan artists' haven
where they both lived.  "When I saw Harry's film last
night, it just seemed to me like Harry--innocent," she
said.  Smith echoed that sentiment in the evening with
her song "Boy Cried Wolf," which features the line
"innocence had its day." And there was an innocent
quality to her tentative yet dramatic recitation of
"Pirate Jenny" from the Brecht/Weill "The Threepenny
Opera," and a fully sung version of "Alabama Song,"
which, she joked, is the hit single of "Mahagonny." 

And her overall reaction to the film? "It made me
cry," she said in the symposium, sheepishly adding,
"when I'd wake up."  





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