Being John Smith is a deceptively wry and deeply felt work by the English avant-garde legend, in which Smith reflects on his life and career by way of his generic name, grappling with his own mortality and legacy, through a minimal, unassuming deployment of text, image, and voice.
'Associations' sets language against itself by using the ambiguities inherent in the English language. Images from magazines and color supplements accompany a voice-over reading from the book 'Word Associations and Linguistic Theory' by academic linguistic Herbert H. Clark. Combining a wry sense of...
Filmed from the artist’s window during the first English lockdown, ‘Citadel’ combines short fragments from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s speeches relating to coronavirus with views of the London skyline.
Filmmaker John Smith revisits the original locations of his seminal experimental film The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) after 35 years, using superimposition to compare now to then.
A view across the border in Nicosia, the divided capital of Cyprus. The camera looks over the rooftops of the Greek Cypriot south to the mountains of the Turkish Republic in the north, where a display of nationalism is enhanced by filmic means. Moving between macro and micro perspectives, Flag...
At Stamford Road in Dalston Junction of east London, the camera follows pedestrians, cars and birds while a narrator, who appears to be the director behind the camera, seems to instruct the objects.
Artist John Smith tells stories about tower block life, editing in bold, unconventional fashion, cutting into the material and highlighting the components and conventions of the film form - yet an intimate portrait of the block's inhabitants still emerges.
Rapid cutting between identically framed portrait photographs creates composite faces and various illusions of movement. The film features photographs of students and staff at North-East London Polytechnic, including Tim Bruce, Ian Kerr, Lis Rhodes, Guy Sherwin and myself.
On December 1st 1990, watched by the world’s media, construction worker Graham Fagg of Dover climbed through a hole in a chalk wall 40 metres below the seabed of the English Channel, shook the hand of Philippe Cozette of Calais and shouted, Vive la France! On June 23rd 2016, Britain voted to...
Dad’s Stick features three well-used objects that were shown to the artist by his father shortly before he died. Two of these were so steeped in history that their original forms and functions were almost completely obscured. The third object seemed to be instantly recognizable, but it turned out...
Many of my films involve humour, but unlike the earlier work Shepherd’s Delight attempts to confront the problem of humour head-on, referring directly (since a large part of the film is composed of jokes and their analysis) to the viewer’s perception of the film itself. The film is largely...
In the mid 1970s the EMI company were preparing to market the newly developed video disc. Being uncertain as to what content would be appropriate, and looking for innovative ideas, EMI commissioned four postgraduate film students, including myself, to make short films for market research purposes....
Made over six years in the hotels of six different countries, Hotel Diaries charts the 'War on Terror' era of Bush and Blair through a seven-part series of video recordings that relate personal experiences to the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel/Palestine. In these works, which...
