Harry Smith’s Heaven and Earth Magic parodied Enlightenment views of God as clockmaker

Evidence

There is even a sort of narrative. Chasing a dog that stole her “very valuable” watermelon, the film’s unnamed heroine visits a dentist, is given a powerful anesthetic, and ascends to heaven—in the dentist’s chair. She subsequently toured the remarkably sinister “heavenly land,” which is often located inside a giant head and is orchestrated by a dancing homunculus. Appropriate for Smith’s projection apparatus, his heaven parodies Enlightenment notions of God the Clockmaker. Filled with rotating cogs and Rube Goldberg contraptions, this ethereal realm is something of a machine—although one continually on the verge of careening out of control. Despite some impressive cosmic plumbing, heaven’s denizens are universally subject to violent fragmentation and dispersion. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 701

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The clockmaker God licensed human dominion over earth through engineering — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 849