Movies: John Smith

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....

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....

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....

Abstract animation punctuated by found footage, cut to the song White Light / White Heat by The Velvet Underground....

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

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 F...

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....

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. Movin...

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....

A biblical interpretation of airline safety instructions....

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, t...

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...

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....

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 ...

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 em...

Blue 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 pr...

Celestial Navigation could be seen to work in the tradition of British landscape film in that it incorporates a natural element (the Earths rotation) into the structure of the film. Filmed in the course of one day on a beach the film uses pan and til...

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...

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