John Smith

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

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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 leave the European Union. Inspired by a message for motorists on Eurotunnel trains, Song for Europe is an underwater celebration of Britain’s connection to the mainland.

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“If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.” Matthew 5:38-40

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Recorded from a smartphone screen, its translation app running on the wrong settings and struggling to interpret North London street signs in French and convert them to English, Steve Hates Fish turns errors into unintentional poetry.

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On the 23rd of June 2016 Britain voted to leave the European Union. Who Are We? is a re-working of material from a BBC television debate transmitted a few weeks earlier.”The most provocative of the bunch is John Smith’s Who Are We?. Leading up to the Brexit vote, BBC’s Question Time became ever more vicious and confrontational. Who Are We? is a manipulation of one of those broadcasts, with David Dimbleby prompting “you, sir, up there on the far right” repeatedly.“Get our identity back – vote leave!” one audience member shouts, while another declares himself a veteran, followed by a swift manipulated cut to rapturous applause. It’s a heavily edited and remixed edition of Question Time, but by highlighting those in the audience with attitudes ranging from nationalistic to xenophobic, Smith’s short film shows the now normalised extremism within our society and our political discourse.” Scott Wilson, Common Space magazine, April 2017

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Reflecting on past political problems and the state of the world as it was provides no tools or means for envisioning the future.

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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.

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Filmed in and around Margate on the English coast, Horizon (Five Pounds a Belgian) consists of a series of identically composed images of views out to sea, recorded over several months in dramatically different weather conditions.

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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 to be something else entirely. Focusing on these ambiguous artifacts and events relating to their history, Dad's Stick creates a dialogue between abstraction and literal meaning, exploring the contradictions of memory to hint at the character of “a perfectionist with a steady hand”.

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Waiting by the sea with his camera ready for action, the artist complains about the weather and attempts to describe his intentions and working methods. Soft Work is a film about the making of a film, where the viewer can only imagine what that film might be. It was made spontaneously during the production of Horizon (Five Pounds a Belgian), a video installation commissioned by Turner Contemporary, Margate

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

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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.

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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 Mountain sets dramatic spectacle against everyday life as the inhabitants of both sides of the city go about their daily business.

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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.

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Hamas have just won the Palestinian elections and a chocolate bar in a Rotterdam hotel room eventually reminds the filmmaker that there are more important things going on in the world outside. Exactly one year later he returns to the same city and checks in at a very different hotel.

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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.

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The filmmaker returns to the city where he made the first video in the series [Frozen War] and looks back at the events of the past six years.

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The perception of an Anglo-American hotel room is coloured by new revelations about ‘The War on Terror’ and ‘The Special Relationship’ that exists between Britain and the USA.

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While the Iraq war continues, a day’s sightseeing and the features of a German hotel provoke a stream of thoughts about events large and small.

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As the camera looks out through a barred window and the clock strikes four in a Swiss city, the death of Yasser Arafat provides the starting point for a journey back in time.

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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

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An exploration of the ambiguities of documentary photographs which develops ideas triggered by a German pun. Worst Case Scenario starts out as a series of still photographs depicting daily life on a Viennese street corner. The film re-orders and manipulates a selection of these images, and as it progresses the static world slowly and subtly comes to life. As Sigmund Freud casts his long shadow across the city, an increasingly improbable chain of events and relationships starts to emerge.

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A disorientating experience while attempting to watch the TV news in an Irish hotel room triggers a spontaneous response to the bombing of Afghanistan.

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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.

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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’.

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A portrait of the artist as a not so young man. The film-maker attempts to enter the digital age by making a new video version of his 1978 film 7P.

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A personal interpretation of the poetry and letters of T S Eliot which explores the ambiguities of language and space in a scenario built around an anagram.

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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.

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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.

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