OCTOBER 6
Close-Up Film Centre, London

        (tickets)
                closeupfilmcentre.com












































               (previous event)
Programme 1 (1972–76)
With JOHN SMITH and STANLEY SCHTINTER live in conversation

Triangles (1972, 3m. SD video from 16mm)
Smith’s first 16mm film comprises abstract animation punctuated by found footage, cut to music by The Velvet Underground.

Someone Moving (1972, 5m. SD video from 16mm)
Choreographed actions of a moving figure, broken down into still frames and reanimated in superimposed layers. Soundtrack by Peter Cusack.

The Hut (1973, 5m. SD video from 16mm)
An experiment into visual rhythms that animates still photographs of a decaying building.

Words (1973, 7m. HD video from 16mm) with Lis Rhodes
An exploration of arbitrary meaning involving random combinations of words.

Out the Back (1974, 5m. HD video from Super 8mm [silent])
An improvisation around the view from an urban window, the first of Smith’s films to be edited in camera.

William and the Cows (1974, 6m. HD video from Super 8mm re-filmed on 16mm [silent])
Slowed down glimpses of life on the island of Sark.
“One of the most surreal films I have ever seen.”
    - Malcolm Le Grice

Faces (1974, 6m. HD video from 16mm [silent])
A study of movement and stasis involving the animation of still photographs.

Associations (1975, 7m. HD video from 16mm)
Images from magazines and colour supplements accompany a spoken text taken from Word Associations and Linguistic Theory by Herbert H Clark. Playing upon ambiguities inherent in the English language, Associations sets language against itself. Image and word work together/against each other to destroy/create meaning.

Leading Light (1975, 11m. HD video from 16mm)
“Leading Light uses the camera-eye to reveal the irregular beauty of a familiar space. When we inhabit a room we are only unevenly aware of the space held in it and the possible forms of vision which reside there. The camera-eye documents and returns our apprehension. Vertov imagined a ‘single room’ made up of a montage of many different rooms. Smith reverses this aspect of ‘creative geography’ by showing how many rooms the camera can create from just one.”
    - 
A L Rees

The Girl Chewing Gum (1976, 12m. HD video from 16mm)
A commanding voice over appears to direct the action in a busy London street. As the instructions become more absurd and fantasised, we realise that the supposed director (not the shot) is fictional; he only describes - not prescribes - the events that take place before him.
"Smith takes the piss out of mainstream auteurist ego, but provides proof of the underground ethos: Even with meagre mechanical means, the artist can command the universe."
    - Ed Halter

TRT 66 mins

Mark





In celebration of John Smith’s 50 years of filmmaking, purge.xxx presented the most extensive survey of his work to date: screening 50 films by Smith, organised into 10 weekly programmes, every Thursday from October to December in 2022, at Close-Up Film Centre and Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London.

The weekly programmes were arranged chronologically, combining rarely screened works with well-known favourites.



JOHN SMITH: INTROSPECTIVE (1972–2022) was organised by Stanley Schtinter.

Click the publication titles for coverage from: The Guardian, Artforum, Frieze, Hackney Citizen

For more information and to buy the Blight soundtrack (featuring original music by Jocelyn Pook for John Smith’s film of the same name) visit purge.xxx

For Smith’s work: johnsmithfilms.com



“John Smith is my favourite British filmmaker.”
    - Jarvis Cocker



“His genius is in taking found
material, the most banal situation, the slightest little cue, and imbuing it with a fiction that makes it potent.  It’s as if by choosing as his subject the ordinary everyday things that surround us all, and by scrutinising them closely, turning them over and inside out, he can find all the hidden complexity of the universe.”
   
- Cornelia Parker



“My taste in films is the same as in music, or in literature. I cannot reduce myself to one or two or three names. I am interested in all of the different forms, which give me pleasure and inspire me and keep me alive. So that's why I embrace a very wide variety of cinema. I like John Ford, and I like Stan Brakhage and Marie Menken, Barbara Rubin, Jack Smith, Harry Smith. And John Smith, whom I have not seen yet, but I hear everybody says he is very good.”
    - Jonas Mekas




Mark