OCTOBER 20
Close-Up Film Centre

        (tickets)
                closeupfilmcentre.com










































                (previous event)
Programme 3 (1978-84)
With JOHN SMITH and JULIET JACQUES live in conversation


Double Shutter (1978 / 2018, 7m. SD video from 16mm)
As a reassemblage of two excerpts from Blue Bathrooom (1978), Double Shutter is a distillation of ideas concerning the tension between representation and materiality. An apparently straightforward representational image is gradually revealed to be an artifice, foregrounding the filmmaking process as subject matter. By superimposing and alternating identical framings of three windows filmed by day and by night the film uses their positive/negative qualities to construct and break down representational images and sounds.

7P (1978, 8m. SD video from 16m)
7P is constructed around the carol The Twelve Days of Christmas, juxtaposing similar picture and sound fragments recorded on consecutive days over the Christmas period. When the seemingly predictable structure starts falling apart, nonsensical combinations of word and image begin to acquire their own unfathomable meanings.

Celestial Navigation (1980, 10m. HD video from 16mm)
“Celestial Navigation could be seen to work in the tradition of British landscape film in that it incorporates a ‘natural’ element (the Earth’s rotation) into the structure of the film. Filmed in the course of one day on a beach, the film uses pan and tilt movements to follow the shadow of a spade and retain its vertical position in the frame… Many peripheral elements come into the film, adding humour to an otherwise near scientific exercise. The tide comes in, a sandcastle is built and washed away, a cyclist crosses the scene, which all works to incorporate human presence without denying the original strategy.”
    - Michael Maziere

Light Sleep (1981, 6m. HD video from 16mm)
An experiment in temporal layering involving the parallel development of sound and picture. Shots of the same scenes were superimposed on each other in camera over a number of hours, up to a maximum of about a hundred superimpositions.

Shepherd's Delight (an ananalysis of humour) (1980-4, 35m. HD video from 16mm)
Shepherd’s Delight confronts 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 the film itself. The film is largely concerned with how context determines the reading of information. Since the film’s statements oscillate between the deadly serious (concentrating particularly on an examination of the more sinister aspects of humour) and the totally bogus, with no clearly defined points of changeover, the context is often ambiguous. This strategy undermines both the authority of the ‘serious’ statements and any predictable effect of the ‘jokes’.    
"Shepherd’s Delight turned on the very humour for which Smith is noted, revealing the dark as well as the light side of jokes. Doubt, scepticism and a sense of the arbitrary all pointed to deeper patterns in his films.  The opposition of illusionism and materiality, the key motif of the post-war avant-garde cinema, is used here and elsewhere in his work to underpin subtle questioning and undercutting of the authority of the word."
    - A L Rees

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