John Smith (1952), one of the most emblematic filmmakers of the post-war British avant-garde, is a creator distinguished by an exceptionally lively, subtly humorous attention to film and its materiality. In his extensive oeuvre of more than sixty works, intertwining the fields of cinema, video and gallery installations, he challenges the relations between word, sound and image with an always playful approach. 

While studying at the Royal College of Art, Smith became an active member of the London Film-Makers' Co-op (today LUX), which, especially in the 1970s, was expressly oriented towards a structural-materialist approach to film, an influence that, to some extent, is still reflected in his work. 

But as a filmmaker, Smith does not like to be pigeonholed – the diversity of his approach can be observed already in his early films, such as Association (1975), Leading Light (1975) and his cult work The Girl Chewing Gum (1976). If, in films like Association, he represents the Godardian principle of playing with the dialectical relationship between word and image through a tense foregrounding of montage, then, in Leading Light, he comes closer to exploring the impressionistic contingencies of a place familiar to him through longer exposures of the camera-eye. Both lines are connected by an emphasised positioning of the subjective gaze of the filmmaker himself, who also becomes an active protagonist in his later works – not only with his voiceover but also with his image (for example, in Regression [1998–1999] or Being John Smith [2024]). 

One of the common threads running through Smith’s oeuvre is his attitude to the everyday, finding stories in the most ordinary, even invisible banalities of the living and, even more often, the non-living nature in his surroundings. Smith mostly draws inspiration from the visual impressions of his native East London – sometimes a look out the window suffices, like in The Black Tower (1985–1987) or Blight (1994–1996). At other times, he is inspired by found objects and images, which, in one way or another – mostly by accident as one of the main factors in his creative process – find their way into the range of his cinema-eye, like in unusual Red cardigan (2011), Steve Hates Fish (2015) or the series Hotel Diaries (2001–2007). Smith is a man with a movie camera, one of those filmmakers who, in a telling and playful gesture echoing Agnès Varda, never let go of their camera – be it 8mm or digital and today even a mobile phone – as the key extension of their gaze. 

The two programmes bring a cross-section of Smith’s extensive oeuvre and emphasise the filmmaker’s diverse exploration of film and video forms, but above all highlight his attention to the social environment through a bricolage of created and found images, which, in an often humorous address, repeatedly engage, surprise or awaken from distraction the gaze of their audience.

“For me, the films that are most interesting are the ones that in some way invent their own language. If you are inventing a language in a film people need to be able to learn to understand it. So the film actually has to teach people a language, and you can only do that if what you do is economical, and avoids misleading elements. It is similar to the way in which children learn, for example, through mistakes and repetition.” - John Smith

Anja Banko