John Smith

TB2023 cinema program

Born in London in 1952, John Smith explodes the difference between lived time and recorded time, repeatedly measuring the distance from the magic and mechanism of cinema to the intimate moments and fragility of his own daily life. Part artist and part radical documentarian, Smith reminds us, in a time awash with audiovisual material, that recordings are simple spools of linear time with their own beginnings and endings. Taken a step further, however—or rather by taking recordings a little bit too seriously, too literally—Smith begins to draw strange parallels between recordings of his own life and the lives of recordings themselves as doorways to other dimensions. By mischievously celebrating spectacle as a form of denial, Smith’s films manage to break open the world of appearances more generally as both mechanical and magical at the same time.

Lost Sound (1998–2001), a collaboration with artist, theater-maker, and composer Graeme Miller, documents fragments of discarded audio tape by playing sound from each piece of tape over images of the location where it was found on the streets of East London. The result charmingly transposes linear recording and playback dynamics onto the urban landscape. Storage and retrieval become a remembering and forgetting of specific places and times, which can also be fast-forwarded and rewound. The cultural detritus imprinted on the recordings comes across as a leakage of an automatic subconscious.

Smith’s classic 1976 film The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) both affirms and denies the artificiality of cinema. A narrator speaking in voiceover tries to command all action on the street like a film director or neighborhood dictator, and then proceeds to command space and time like a small god with supernatural powers. In fact, he only describes what is already happening, as if he had simply watched the film before.

Made in collaboration with composer Jocelyn Pook, Blight (1994–96) is a meditation on a building in East London at the center of a long and bitter campaign by local residents to protect their homes from demolition for the construction of a highway. The soundtrack combines the sounds of these events with fragments from recorded conversations with local people.

Gargantuan (1992) is a short film in which Smith lies in bed talking to a lizard, which first fills the screen and is called “huge,” then “medium” as the camera zooms out, and then “tiny” as it appears very small on the pillow, and finally “minute”—an English pun on the length of the film as it concludes at the one-minute mark.

In Dirty Pictures (2007), part of Smith’s series of films using hotel rooms as found objects/sets, the filmmaker finds himself in a hotel in East Jerusalem, where he encounters strange problems with the room’s ceiling before looking out his window to behold the West Bank barrier, a massive wall built by the State of Israel in its military occupation of Palestine.

Works by John Smith on view in the TB2023 Exhibition:
The Girl Chewing Gum (1976), Blight (1994–96, in collaboration
with Jocelyn Pook), Gargantuan (1992), Dirty Pictures
(Hotel Diaries 6), 2007.