OCTOBER 1
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London

 
      (tickets)
                ica.art









































                (back to full listings)
LAUNCH EVENT (1972-2020)
With JOHN SMITH and JOCELYN POOK 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.

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.

Shine So Hard (1981, 32 mins. HD video from 16mm)
Commissioned by Warner Brothers Music.
“John Smith’s film matches conventional, excellently shot material of Echo and the Bunnymen live (from a specially arranged concert at Buxton Pavilion) with footage that attempts to locate the band in a context of more abstract imagery. Smith deliberately, and jokingly, allows the two sections to collide rather than attempting to blend them.”
    - Steve Jenkins

Gargantuan (1992, 1m. HD video from 16mm)
“A gigantic reptile fills the frame as Smith begins to sing. The manipulative power of script and framing in film and video is sharply yet playfully highlighted in a single shot.”

    - Helen Legg

Blight (1994-96, 14 mins. HD video from 16mm)
Blight
revolves around the building of the M11 Link Road in East London, combining images and sounds of demolition and road building with the spoken words of local residents. Taking these actualities as its starting point, Blight exploits the ambiguities of its material to create its own metaphorical fictions. The emotive power of Jocelyn Pook’s music is used in the film to overtly aid this invention, investing mundane images with dramatic significance.
"A stunning montage depicts the destruction of a London street to make way for new roads. The rhythmic, emotive soundtrack is partly musical and partly a collage of the residents’ voices. Shots and sounds echo and cross-link in the film’s 14 minutes to reinvent a radical documentary tradition."
   
- A L Rees

Song for Europe (2017, 4 mins. HD video)
Inspired by a message for motorists on Eurotunnel trains, Song for Europe is an underwater celebration of Britain’s connection to the mainland.

The Camera, The Actor (2019, 5 mins. HD video)
An hommage to cinema, made to accompany Charles Hayward’s song of the same title.

Twice (2020, 3 mins. HD video)
Self-isolating at home during the COVID-19 lockdown, the artist follows the British government's advice.

TRT 69 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