John Smith

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“An autobiographical reflection on his unassuming name leads the filmmaker down a wayward path through family photographs, personal archives, and internet searches. Alternately wry and wistful, peppered with Smith’s characteristically droll commentary, Being John Smith flits between self-deprecation and cris de coeur, offering quietly hilarious observations on Smith’s lower middle class origins and career as an avant-garde cinema luminary, as well as unexpectedly melancholic impressions on age and extinction.” New York Film FestivalRead More »

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A short film in which a director’s voice appears to be directing all the action on a busy London street.Read More »

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A short film which combines magazine pictures and text in the form of word association game.

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Images from magazines and colour supplements accompany a spoken text taken from Word Associations and Linguistic Theory by the American psycholinguist 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.Read More »

Alexander Stewart, notes for screening at Pioneer Works, New York 2015, wrote:
A mesmerizing experimental documentary that presents a discussion of the manufacture of glass as a way to explore memory and transformation. Filled with Smith’s signature witty wordplay and elegant visual punning, Slow Glass also quietly ponders weighter issues of urban transformation and the value placed on craftsmanship.Read More »

The buzzing of an electric razor is replaced by Om chanting as a sharp-looking man gets ready.

Gary Davis wrote:
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.

Peter Kubelka, ‘What is Film’ lecture series, National Film Theatre, London 2001, wrote:
This is hardcore cinema.Read More »

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A satirical exploration of the origins of humor that moves between the absurd and the deadly serious.Read More »

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Worst Case Scenario is constructed from a collection of still photographs depicting daily life on a Viennese street corner. Shot over the course of a week from a window overlooking the scene, the film explores the ambiguities of its images, developing themes that focus upon watching and being watched, distance and uneasy proximity. As the static world of the photographs gradually comes to life, the soundtrack introduces another, unseen, space to the viewer and an increasingly improbable chain of events and relationships starts to emerge.Read More »

Fred Camper, Chicago Reader, 2001, wrote:
A particularly beautiful lily seems to grow before our eyes, gradually changing shape; what sounds like breathing on the sound track gives it an almost human presence. Suddenly the sound and movement stop as a glass plate, invisible until now, cracks – and it seems we’ve been watching, in Smith’s words, ‘the forced development of a hothouse flower’.Read More »

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A personal interpretation of the poetry and letters of T S Eliot. The Waste Land explores the ambiguities of language and space in a scenario built around an anagram.Read More »