Harry Smith (1923-), filmmaker and painter. Born in Portland, Oregon. Self taught, he grew up in a deserted boom town on Puget Sound, where his father, an oculist, turned over to him an abandoned blacksmith shop when Smith was 12 years old and instructed him in alchemy. Active in Berkeley and San Francisco in the 1940s, he associated with such innovative filmmakers as John and James Whitney, Frank Stauffacher, James Broughton, and Jordan Belson, and made his own first abstract films by painting, drawing, and batiking directly on the film. He also painted murals at Jimbo's Bop City, an after hours jazz club on Fillmore Street. Smith left for New York around 1950, where he began to concentrate on animated collages that translated the dream language of Max Ernst to film with extraordinary magic and beauty. His early abstract films were influential in the 1950s among such Bay Area filmmakers as Jordan Belson, Jane Conger Belson, and Patricia Marks. p. 314.