John Smith

This critically acclaimed DVD contains 16 of the best classic and award winning British short films and delivers a snapshot of British cinema past and present. It includes films from Britain's most exciting new talent alongside early shorts from it's most successful filmmakers' amongst them Chris Nolan (Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins), Ridley Scott (Gladiator, Alien), Mike Leigh (Secrets and Lies) and Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot, The Hours). 01 About a Girl - Brian Percival 02 Boy & Bicycle - Ridley Scott 03 Dear Phone - Peter Greenaway 04 Doodlebug - Christopher Nolan 05 Eight - Stephen Daldry 06 Gasman - Lynne Ramsay 07 Girl Chewing Gum - John Smith 08 Home - Morag McKinnon 09 Joyride - Jim Gillespie 10 Inside Out - Tom & Charles Guard 11 Je T’aime John Wayne - Toby Macdonald 12 The Sheep Thief - Asif Kapadia 13 The Short & Curlies - Mike Leigh 14 Telling Lies - Simon Ellis 15 UK Images - Martin Parr 16 Who’s My Favourite Girl? - Adrian J. McDowall

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 play upon chance and coincidence, hotel rooms are employed as 'found' film sets, where architecture, furnishing and decoration become the means by which the filmmaker’s small adventures are linked to major world events.

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.

The discovery of a VHS tape of the artist's films on eBay triggers obsessive speculation about the seller's identity.

A short film featuring the voices of those affected when the M11 Link Road in East London was built, accompanied by scenes and sounds of demolition.

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. As the disc would be expensive to produce and would necessarily retail for a high price, EMI were looking for content that viewers would want to watch on multiple occasions, bizarrely setting the brief that the films had to be based on the Guinness Book of Records. I decided to make a multi-layered piece that was so dense that multiple viewings would be required in order to assimilate all of its information.

After the world premiere of Being John Smith at the Toronto Film Festival a strange experience in the filmmaker’s hotel causes him to ponder the nature of reality.

THE CAMERA, THE ACTOR was commissioned by musician Charles Hayward to accompany the song of the same name on his album entitled (Begin Anywhere).

Back stroke butterfly, front crawl and bras, we are awash in an ocean of bubbles. Meanwhile Captain Ahab sets sail on his magic carpet in search of the whale. All is not well in the world but Eden is there, fresh from her garden, tuning into “The Far Away Land”. We are deep in the cloud of our own making but help is at hand, and everything might yet be alright.

“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 2001

A man finds himself haunted by a mysterious black tower in London that appears to follow him wherever he goes.

Moving from one hotel in Bethlehem to another in East Jerusalem, the filmmaker encounters a series of problems involving a ceiling, a video camera and the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

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.

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’.

Home Suite, Smith’s first video work, is a close-up journey through a domestic landscape and a journey through memory, containing only three cuts over the course of its ninety-six minutes duration. Playing upon ambiguity and the unseen, the tape uses physical details of the space to trigger fragmented verbal descriptions of associated memories.

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.

The only time I’ve visited a communist country was when I went to Poland in 1980, not long after Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government was first elected in Britain. I first visited the former East Germany in 1997, eight years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and a few months after Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ government was elected. Recalling these experiences many years later, White Hole questions our imaginings of life in other places, times and political systems, mirroring its narrative through its form.

A film about haircuts, clothes and image/sound relationships. - J.S.

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.

'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 humor with word/visual games and puns, Smith explores the boundaries of cinematic montage by combining elements together and against each other in order to destroy and create multiple meanings at the same time.