Marking Harry Smith's death in 1991, J. Hoberman wrote, "A founding father of American independent cinema, Harry Smith made his first hand-painted movies in San Francisco in the 1940s, then spent more than twenty years working on Heaven and Earth Magic-an enigmatic masterpiece that pushed cut-and-paste collage animation to the outer limits of possibility. Films, however, only made up a portion of Smith's project. Awarded a Grammy (in 1990) for his pioneer field recordings of Native American music, Smith was an expert on Kiowa peyote rituals, an authority on Ukrainian painted Easter eggs, an alchemist, a magus, and a major-league mystery." Harry Smith, who linked his method to the Surrealists via William Burroughs, commented, "Some kind of universal process was directing these so-called arbitrary processes...(I tried) to remove things as much as possible from consciousness...As much as I was able, I made it automatic."