John Smith

  • John Smith – The Girl Chewing Gum (1976)

    1971-1980ExperimentalJohn SmithUnited Kingdom

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

  • John Smith – Associations (1975)

    1971-1980ExperimentalJohn SmithUnited Kingdom

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

    Quote:
    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 »

  • John Smith – Om (1986)

    1981-1990ExperimentalJohn SmithUnited Kingdom

    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 »

  • John Smith – Shepherd’s Delight (1984)

    1981-1990ExperimentalJohn SmithUnited Kingdom

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

  • John Smith – Worst Case Scenario (2003)

    2021-2030ExperimentalJohn SmithUnited Kingdom

    Quote:
    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 »

  • John Smith & Ian Bourn – The Kiss (1999)

    1991-2000ExperimentalIan BournJohn SmithUnited Kingdom

    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 »

  • John Smith – The Waste Land (1999)

    1991-2000ExperimentalJohn SmithUnited KingdomVideo Art

    Quote:
    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 »

  • John Smith – Gargantuan (1992)

    1991-2000ExperimentalJohn SmithUnited Kingdom

    Quote:
    A man uses different words to describe an amphibian as the film evolves.

    Fred Camper, Chicago Reader 2001, wrote:
    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.

    Elaine Paterson, Time Out 1992, wrote:
    A wonderfully witty example of how to conduct pillow talk with a small amphibian.Read More »

  • John Smith & Graeme Miller – Lost Sound (2001)

    2001-2010ExperimentalGraeme MillerJohn SmithUnited KingdomVideo Art

    Quote:
    Lost Sound documents fragments of discarded audio tape found on the streets of a small area of East London, combining the sound retrieved from each piece of tape with images of the place where it was found. The work explores the potential of chance, creating portraits of particular places by building formal, narrative and musical connections between images and sounds linked by the random discovery of the tape samples.Read More »

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