Like the art cinema of David Lynch or Luis Bunuel (not to mention Harrington's most immediate influence/mentor, the long-venerated celluloid poet Maya Deren, whose 1943 short Meshes of an Afternoon clearly turned the budding filmmaker Harrington on to the medium's wider-than-imagined possibilities), Harrington's films aren't abstract so much as they, very much like a dream (the closest experience to cinema real life offers, and offered long before movies ever existed), consist of narratives with recognizable, "real" human figures and places where some kind of story is happening, except with a disconcerting adherence to their own unpredictable, irrational internal logic and sign systems. In 1946's 13-minute Fragment of Seeking, his first completed work as a mature filmmaker, a twentysomething Harrington himself appears as the bespectacled, fedora'd, trenchcoat-clad, faintly androgynous (he resembles Truman Capote a bit) young man who, when he enters through an imposing gate into the courtyard of a beautiful old ivy-covered L.A. apartment building, is captivated and led ever deeper into a mysterious realm (like Alice down the rabbit hole) by a girl who, with her Veronica Lake blonde tresses, is ravishing enough to be a starlet. As he watches and pursues her through the walkways and corridors around and inside of the building, what at first looks like voyeuristic flirtation becomes a journey into the young man's own deepest fears and desires -- a gorgeous and terrifying pulling back of the veil of surface reality for a glimpse of both his true self and that too-close-for-comfort Freudian link between sex and death. Like all of this early work, the film is more or less silent-with-score (by Ernest Gold, whose music is fantastically cinematic and integral to setting the mood of many of these these moody pictures), and Harrington uses no effects any more special than the skilled, inspired manipulation of shadow and light and a very finely honed intuitiveness at the editing table to create a world as convincing and vivid as it is removed from realism -- one with a lush, eerie atmosphere fraught with allure, suspense, danger, and dread.