Harry Smith was a paradoxical fixture on the Bay Area’s post-World War II art scene, an inventive filmmaker and a budding music archivist who sought success, then zealously rejected it.

As John Szwed writes in “Cosmic Scholar,” his interesting but uneven biography, Smith dubbed some of his benefactors “psychopaths,” rolled the original of a reel of film down a street and told audiences that watching his movies could be “extremely boring.” The latter wasn’t always true — at a screening in New York, he tossed a tape recorder into the audience. Elsewhere, he “set fire to the film while it was in the projector, even threw a projector out a window.”

Smith, who was 68 when he died in New York in 1991, lived in Berkeley in the 1940s and San Francisco in the late ’40s and early ’50s. He showed some of his films at the San Francisco Museum of Art, as SFMOMA was then known. If his labor-intensive and little-seen animations — abstract collages of moving images, which he created by hand-drawing on film stock — proved more memorable for the public commotion that accompanied them, Smith’s discerning ear had a profound impact on contemporary music.

Smith was a teen in the Pacific Northwest when he began collecting record albums around 1940, and during World War II, he learned that the federal government was gathering records “for the shellac that was used in their making, which was scarce and needed for the war effort,” Szwed writes. Lest they be destroyed, Smith “acquired” 20,000 records of varying music genres.

From these and other albums, he assembled the “Anthology of American Folk Music,” a sprawling set of ballads, spirituals and blues songs that, according to Szwed, influenced Bruce Springsteen and many others. Smith’s compilation illustrated how “recordings of white Appalachian music showed Black influence,” Szwed writes, and featured songs by a variety of underappreciated and exploited musicians. Bob Dylan recorded “at least 15 of his own versions” of the 84 songs on Smith’s “Anthology.”

It’s a fascinating story — and one that highlights some of the book’s shortcomings. How exactly did Smith, who had no money of his own, “acquire” those 20,000 records? Szwed doesn’t explain. Nor does he clarify why the military wanted shellac. (It was used in the production of explosives, according to reputable online sources.)

There are other frustrating gaps. Recounting Smith’s meeting with a singer, Szwed writes, “Just as he was arriving at her trailer in a thunderstorm, he tried peyote for the first time.” Did this influence Smith’s behavior or the singer’s impression of him? Again, Szwed, the author of many books and a former Yale University professor, leaves us wondering.

Smith destroyed many of his artworks and papers, making Szwed’s job harder — a point the author returns to whenever his search for details yields none. But Szwed doesn’t always have his facts right.

When Joe Gould, an eccentric street character who was the subject of famous New Yorker articles by Joseph Mitchell, “died in a mental hospital” in 1957, Szwed writes, “no one bothered to come to his funeral.” A 1957 Village Voice article about the funeral — easily found on the publication’s website — states that “(p)erhaps 80 people were there,” among them “photographers, reporters, NBC and CBS men.”

Szwed, though, writes evocatively about the postwar jazz scene in San Francisco, where Clint Eastwood and Willie Brown, both teens, might frequent a club where Charlie Parker or Billie Holiday performed. More than once, a Smith-made film played at Jimbo’s Bop City in San Francisco, “with jazz musicians improvising a soundtrack,” Szwed writes. It was “the first light show of the type that would later shape psychedelic rock bands on the West Coast in the 1960s.”

And while he clearly admires Smith, Szwed doesn’t romanticize his countercultural instincts. Smith was deeply reliant on generous friends like poet Allen Ginsberg and filmmaker Jonas Mekas, and prone to nasty outbursts that made him look foolish and insecure.

Smith, as a person quoted by Szwed puts it, believed his work would make him “famous when he was dead.” It’s true that “Cosmic Scholar” presents a singular life story, though its telling is undermined by choppy reporting.

凯文•坎菲尔德是一个自由撰稿人.