John Smith was born in Walthamstow, London in 1952 and studied film at the Royal College of Art, during which time he became a member of the London Filmmakers Co-op. Since 1972 Smith has made over fifty film, video and installation works that have been shown in independent cinemas, art galleries and on television around the world and awarded major prizes at many international film festivals. He received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists in 2011, and in 2013 he was the winner of Film London’s Jarman Award.
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 o ...
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'Covid Messages' is a video in six parts, based around broadcasts of Prime Minister Boris Johnson's COVID-19 press conferences. The work focusses on the British government's attempts to eliminate the virus through the use of magic spells and rituals. While ...
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A larger than life tribute to Prince Philip, His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh, recorded in 2002 and completed on the day of his death, April 9th 2021. ...
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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. ...
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John Smith stands in front of a mirror, singing "Happy Birthday" in a minor key, like a funeral dirge, twice, as he washes his hands. ...
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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! ...
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"If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. ...
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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 Brexi ...
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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 Be ...
Watch NowFilmed 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 ...
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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 ...
Watch NowThe 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. ...
Watch NowA 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 betw ...
Watch NowThe 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. ...
Watch NowHamas 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 i ...
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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. ...
Watch NowThe 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. ...
Watch NowWhile 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. ...
Watch NowAs 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 ...
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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 manipulate ...
Watch NowA 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, creati ...
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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. ...
Watch NowA 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 – a ...
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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 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 physi ...
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"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 'strapp ...
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A man finds himself haunted by a mysterious black tower in London that appears to follow him wherever he goes. ...
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'Dungeness' was originally made for 'Dungeness: The Desert in the Garden', a multi-media theatre production directed by Graeme Miller. By selectively framing and alternating monochrome fields within the Dungeness landscape the film creates a series of abst ...
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Many of my films involve humour, but unlike the earlier work Shepherd's Delight attempts to confront the problem of humour head-on, referring directly (since a large part of the film is composed of jokes and their analysis) to the viewer's perception of th ...
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'Shine So Hard' is a rare Echo and the Bunnymen promotional concert film, taking place during their 1981 'Camo Tour'. ...
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A reworking of material from the 16mm film 'Blue Bathroom', a distillation of ideas concerning the tension between representation and materiality. By superimposing and alternating identical framings of two windows filmed by day and by night the film uses t ...
Watch NowBlue Bathroom is a distillation of ideas concerning the tension between representation and materiality. It begins with an apparently straightforward representational image which is gradually revealed to be an artifice, foregrounding the filmmaking process ...
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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. ...
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An improvisation recorded over the course of one day, starting at dawn and finishing after dusk. The film was edited in camera and shot from one camera position in the middle of one of the 112 football pitches that cover Hackney Marsh, a location chosen b ...
Watch NowIn 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 ...
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At Stamford Road in Dalston Junction of east London, the camera follows pedestrians, cars and birds while a narrator, who appears to be the director behind the camera, seems to instruct the objects. ...
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'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 ...
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John Smith's Leading Light evolves a sense of screen depth and surface through the simple agency of light. The film is shot in a room over a period of a day and records the changes in light through the single window. The image is controlled through manipul ...
Watch NowRapid 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 Sh ...
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Super 8 footage of a moving figure (Lis Rhodes), broken down into still frames and reanimated in superimposed layers. Soundtrack by Peter Cusack. ...
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Abstract animation punctuated by found footage, cut to the song White Light / White Heat by The Velvet Underground. ...
Watch NowBeing 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 o ...
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Gaza, December 2023. A confrontation with a disturbing photograph on social media triggers questions about what it means to be an onlooker. ...
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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 ...
Watch NowThe discovery of a VHS tape of the artist's films on eBay triggers obsessive speculation about the seller's identity. ...
Watch NowA 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. ...
Watch NowHome 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 physi ...
Watch NowA man finds himself haunted by a mysterious black tower in London that appears to follow him wherever he goes. ...
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