John Smith's film, video and installation works have been shown in
cinemas, art galleries and on television throughout the world. They
have been screened at over a hundred international film festivals and
awarded major prizes in Hamburg, Leipzig, Oberhausen, Cork, Palermo,
Graz, Uppsala, Bangkok, Ann Arbor and Chicago. Recent exhibitions
include one-person shows at Pearl Gallery (London), Open Eye Gallery
(Liverpool), Australian Centre for the Moving Image (Melbourne) and
retrospectives at Oberhausen, Cork, Tampere and Uppsala international
film festivals.
John Smith is Professor of Fine Art Film & Video at the
University of East London.
"The films of John Smith conduct a serious investigation into the combination of sound and image, but with a sense of humour that reaches out beyond the traditional avant-garde audience. His films move between narrative and absurdity, constantly undermining the traditional relationship between the visual and the aural. By blurring the perceived boundaries of experimental film, fiction and documentary, Smith never delivers what he has led the spectator to expect." -Mark Webber (Leeds International Film Festival catalogue 2000)
"Internationally renowned for a body of work that spans 30 years, charts social and political shifts and reveals the essence of film itself, John Smith's films, videos and installations are those of a master craftsman and a maestro of deception. Multiple layerings of jokes, visual and aural puns, narrative tricks, editing feats and breathtakingly sharp structural analyses obscure and ultimately reveal an intensely personal root. Unreliable narrators variously figure as subject and object, character, camera and editor as the dynamics of narrative repeatedly confound expectation. Smith's love of storytelling is matched in its brilliance by conceptual rigour, courting authority to reveal it as defunct with an irreverence that belies profound humanitarian, political and social concerns. Disregarding the boundaries between fact and fiction, documentary and narrative construction, these works are hysterically funny, vital, and continuously astonishing." -Ian White (from catalogue essay for John Smith retrospective at Oberhausen International Short Film Festival 2002)
"The popularity of John Smith's films can be explained by his wry sense of humour, his play on language and the elegance of his visual style. His understated humour thinly conceals a darker layer of meaning in his films. John Smith's skill as both narrator and composer of visual narratives leaves us discomforted even as we smile." -Catherine Elwes (UK/Canadian Video Exchange 2000)
"…These films can be enjoyed as stories; films for everyone, especially in their humour. They comprise a personal topography of East London, blighted but alive. Viewers are enticed to interrogate the very illusions that films construct in front of their eyes - and behind their backs." -A.L. Rees (A Directory of British Film & Video Artists 1996)
Complete Filmography -
(All works are 16mm, colour, optical sound unless otherwise
specified)
Triangles 1972, 3mins, magnetic sound.
Someone Moving 1972, 5mins, magnetic sound.
The Hut 1973, 5mins, magnetic sound.
Words 1973, 7mins, magnetic sound. Collaboration with Lis
Rhodes.
William and the Cows 1974, 6mins, silent.
Faces 1 1975, 11mins, B/W, silent.
Faces 2 1974, 3mins, B/W, silent.
Associations 1975, 7mins.
Leading Light 1975, 11mins.
Nine Short Stories 1975, 3mins, B/W, silent.
Subjective Tick-Tocks 1975, 11mins, B/W, magnetic sound.
The Girl Chewing Gum 1976, 12mins, B/W.
Summer Diary 1976-7, 30mins, magnetic sound.
Hackney Marshes - November 4th 1977 1977, 15mins, silent.
Gardner 1977, 6mins, video.
Hackney Marshes (TV version) 1978, 30mins, video.
7P 1978, 7mins.
Blue Bathroom 1979, 14mins.
Celestial Navigation 1980, 10mins, magnetic sound.
Spring Tree 1980, 3mins, silent.
Shine So Hard 1981, 32mins, magnetic sound.
Light Sleep 1981, 6mins.
Shepherd's Delight 1980-4, 35mins.
Om 1986, 4mins.
The Black Tower 1985-7, 24mins.
Dungeness (3 films for theatre production) 1987, 12mins,
silent.
Slow Glass 1988-91, 40mins.
Gargantuan 1992, 1min.
Home Suite 1993-4, 96mins, video.
Blight 1996, 14mins, video & 16mm.
The Kiss (in collaboration with Ian Bourn) 1999, 5mins, video.
The Waste Land 1999, 5 mins, video.
Regression 1999, 17 mins, video.
Lost Sound (in collaboration with Graeme Miller) 2001, 28mins,
video.
Frozen War 2001, 11 mins, video.
Worst Case Scenario 2001-3, 18 mins, video.
Images from magazines and colour supplements accompany a spoken text
taken from 'Word Associations and Linguistic Theory' by Herbert H
Clark. By using the ambiguities inherent in the English language,
'Associations' sets language against itself. Image and word work
together/against each other to destroy/create meaning.
" 'Associations' is a straightforward rebus (a game in which words
are replaced by pictures). But the text is so dense (contemporary
linguistic theory) and the combination of visual puns so extensive
that a simple, unique reading of the film is impossible." -A.L. Rees,
Unpacking 7 Films programme notes.
1975, 16mm color/sound 7 minutes $25
"John Smith's 'Leading Light' evolves a sense of screen depth and
surface through the simple agency of light. The film is shot in a
room over a period of a day and records the changes in light through
the single window. The image is controlled through the manipulation
of aperture, of shutter release, of lens, but the effect is more
casual than determined and the spectator is aware primarily of the
determining nature of following sunlight."
-Deke Dusinberre. Perspectives on British Avant-Garde Film
catalogue.
" 'Leading Light' uses the camera-eye to reveal the irregular beauty
of a familiar space. When we inhabit a room we are only unevenly
aware of the space held in it and the possible forms of vision which
reside there. The camera-eye documents and returns our apprehension.
Vertov imagined a 'single room' made up of a montage of many
different rooms. Smith reverses this aspect of 'creative geography'
by showing how many rooms the camera can create from just one." -A.L.
Rees "Unpacking 7 Films" programme notes.
1975, 16mm color/sound 11 minutes $35
"In 'The Girl Chewing Gum' a commanding voice over appears to direct
the action in a busy London street. As the instructions become more
absurd and fantasized, we realize that the supposed director (not the
shot) is fictional; he only describes - not prescribes - the events
that take place before him. Smith embraced the 'spectra of narrative'
(suppressed by structural film), to play word against picture and
chance against order. Sharp and direct, the film anticipates the more
elaborate scenarios to come; witty, many-layered, punning, but also
seriously and poetically haunted by drama's ineradicable
ghost."
-A.L. Rees, A Directory of British Film & Video Artists
"…Self-reflexivity is another Brit kick, semi-spoofed in The Girl
Chewing Gum (1976), in which artist John Smith directs street-level
passersby via post-synched voice-over, then bids buildings and the
sun to move through the frame. Smith takes the piss out of mainstream
auteurist ego, but provides proof of the underground ethos: Even with
meager mechanical means, the artist can command the universe." -Ed
Halter, Village Voice.
"…The resultant voyeurism takes on an uncanny aspect as the blandness
of the scene (shot in black and white on a grey day in Hackney)
contrasts with the near 'magical' control identified with the voice.
The most surprising effect is the ease with which representation and
description turn into phantasm through the determining power of
language." -Michael Maziere, Undercut
"John Smith's improbable treatise on representation has deservedly
become a Co-op classic." -Ian Christie, Time Out.
1976,16mm black and white/sound 12 minutes $35
A short film about haircuts, clothes and image/sound
relationships.
"This four minute film explores our response to stereotypes - aural,
visual and ideological. Smith signals these stereotypes to the viewer
through a chiefly associational system, which deftly manipulates the
path of our expectations. The structure is stunningly simple and
deceptively subtle. We are taken on a journey from one concrete
stereotype to its diametric opposite, as images transform and
juxtapose to, ultimately, invert our interpretation of what we see
and hear." -Gary Davis.
"This is hard-core cinema." - Peter Kubelka, 'What is Film' lecture
series, National Film Theatre, London.
1986, 16mm color/sound 4 minutes $20
"In 'The Black Tower' we enter the world of a man haunted by a tower
which, he believes, is following him around London. While the
character of the central protagonist is indicated only by a narrative
voice-over which takes us from unease to breakdown to mysterious
death, the images, meticulously controlled and articulated, deliver a
series of colour coded puzzles, jokes and puns which pull the viewer
into a mind-teasing engagement. Smith's assurance and skill as a
filmmaker undercuts the notion of the avant-garde as dry,
unprofessional and dull and in "The Black Tower" we have an example
of a film which plays with the emotions as well as the language of
film." -Nik Houghton, Independent Media.
"The Black Tower' expands the core of Smith's interests: chiefly, the
image as a filmic fact which is constantly questioned and often
undermined by language and soundtrack. Like his earlier films, 'The
Black Tower' is concerned with description, but this time framed by a
story whose undertow of melancholy balances its wit and wry humour,
and which is a remarkable fiction in its own right." -A.L.
Rees.
"The hilarious and slightly menacing 'The Black Tower' is one of the
most accomplished films to come from the British avant-garde for
years." -Michael O'Pray, Independent Media.
1987, 16mm color/sound 24 minutes $75
"London artist John Smith uses light-hearted humour to explore
theoretical concerns - Gargantuan, for instance, is both pleasantly
silly and acutely conscious of how imagery depends entirely on its
framing. A voice-over intones the words 'huge' and 'strapping' as a
lizard almost fills the screen, then 'medium' as the camera zooms
out, then 'tiny', and finally 'minute', a pun on the film's running
time." -Fred Camper, Chicago Reader
"To master the one minute time-span requires considerable discipline
and few pieces if any had been shaped as genuine miniatures, most
having the appearance of being extracts from larger works. The
notable exception was John Smith's 'Gargantuan' which was not only
the right length for the idea but actually incorporated a triple pun
on the word 'minute'." -Nicky Hamlyn "One Minute TV 1992",
Vertigo.
"A wonderfully witty example of how to conduct pillow talk with a
small amphibian." -Elaine Paterson, Time Out.
1992, 16mm color/sound 1 minute $20