Programme 6 (1998-2003)
With JOHN SMITH and GARETH EVANS live in conversation

The Kiss (1999, 5 mins. HD video from 16mm) with Ian Bourn
A depiction of the forced development of a hothouse flower. Organic growth is progressively overtaken by a more sinister, mechanical process.

The Waste Land (1999, 5 mins. SD video)
A personal interpretation of the poetry and letters of T S Eliot.

Regression (1999, 17 mins. SD video)
A portrait of the artist as a not so young man. The filmmaker attempts to enter the digital age by making a new video version of his 1978 film 7P. “John Smith is not afraid of time. His films continuously show his patience in setting up a visual pun, filming certain angles over several days or months in order to develop our sense of place and flux. Regression  makes time a focus of his humour. As he recreates a film he made 21 years earlier, he tapes each of the twelve days of Christmas, getting progressively younger as he replays the chorus of the accompanying song.”
    - Chris Kennedy

Lost Sound (1998-2001, 28 mins. SD video) with Graeme Miller 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, creating portraits of particular places by building formal, narrative and musical connections between images and sounds linked by the random discovery of the tape samples. “Visually the audio-tapes tell us almost nothing; they must be ‘decoded’ by the equipment that put them on the soundtrack. But we come to see that the signs, cars, and pedestrians in the videotape pose similar ‘decoding’ problems: what do they mean, where do they come from, who are they? A city that at first seems comprehensible is revealed as a layering of mysteries; we know no more about the passing humans from their images than we do about what's on the crumpled tape.”
    - Fred Camper

Worst Case Scenario (2001-03, 18 mins. HD video from 35mm stills)
Worst Case Scenario is constructed from a collection of still photographs depicting daily life on a Viennese street corner. Shot over the course of a week from a window overlooking the scene, the film develops themes that focus upon watching and being watched, distance and uneasy proximity. As the static world of the photographs gradually comes to life, the soundtrack introduces another, unseen, space to the viewer and an increasingly improbable chain of events and relationships starts to emerge.
"Smith’s 30 years of eccentric, good-humoured and enlightening radical filmmaking opened up endless possibilities for visual creativity.  His ‘Worst Case Scenario’, comprising a stream of movie-like images from rapidly shot camera stills taken on a Vienna street corner, is an exquisite documentation of everyday waiting, eating and road-crossing, with just a whiff of Freud."
    - Keith Gallasch

TRT 73 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