Movies: John Smith

Rapid cutting between identically framed portrait photographs creates composite faces and various illusions of movement. The film features photographs of students and staff at North-East London Polytechnic, including Tim Bruce, Ian Kerr, Lis Rhodes, ...

John Smith’s Leading Light evolves a sense of screen depth and surface through the simple agency of light. The film is shot in a room over a period of a day and records the changes in light through the single window. The image is controlled through m...

The filmmaker returns to the city where he made the first video in the series [Frozen War] and looks back at the events of the past six years....

On the 23rd of June 2016 Britain voted to leave the European Union. Who Are We? is a re-working of material from a BBC television debate transmitted a few weeks earlier.”The most provocative of the bunch is John Smith’s Who Are We?. Leading up to the...

As the camera looks out through a barred window and the clock strikes four in a Swiss city, the death of Yasser Arafat provides the starting point for a journey back in time....

A larger than life tribute to Prince Philip, His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh, recorded in 2002 and completed on the day of his death, April 9th 2021....

The discovery of a VHS tape of the artist's films on eBay triggers obsessive speculation about the seller's identity....

Home Suite, Smith’s first video work, is a close-up journey through a domestic landscape and a journey through memory, containing only three cuts over the course of its ninety-six minutes duration. Playing upon ambiguity and the unseen, the tape uses...

A view across the border in Nicosia, the divided capital of Cyprus. The camera looks over the rooftops of the Greek Cypriot south to the mountains of the Turkish Republic in the north, where a display of nationalism is enhanced by filmic means. Movin...

‘Covid Messages’ is a video in six parts, based around broadcasts of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s COVID-19 press conferences. The work focusses on the British government’s attempts to eliminate the virus through the use of magic spells and rituals....

Waiting by the sea with his camera ready for action, the artist complains about the weather and attempts to describe his intentions and working methods. Soft Work is a film about the making of a film, where the viewer can only imagine what that film ...

A reworking of material from the 16mm film ‘Blue Bathroom’, a distillation of ideas concerning the tension between representation and materiality. By superimposing and alternating identical framings of two windows filmed by day and by night the film ...

On December 1st 1990, watched by the world’s media, construction worker Graham Fagg of Dover climbed through a hole in a chalk wall 40 metres below the seabed of the English Channel, shook the hand of Philippe Cozette of Calais and shouted, Vive la F...

A film by John Smith and Ian Bourn...

“If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.” Matthew 5:38-40...

The only time I’ve visited a communist country was when I went to Poland in 1980, not long after Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government was first elected in Britain. I first visited the former East Germany in 1997, eight years after the fall of ...

Made over six years in the hotels of six different countries, Hotel Diaries charts the 'War on Terror' era of Bush and Blair through a seven-part series of video recordings that relate personal experiences to the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Ira...

Reflecting on past political problems and the state of the world as it was provides no tools or means for envisioning the future....

Filmed in and around Margate on the English coast, Horizon (Five Pounds a Belgian) consists of a series of identically composed images of views out to sea, recorded over several months in dramatically different weather conditions....

Filmmaker John Smith revisits the original locations of his seminal experimental film The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) after 35 years, using superimposition to compare now to then....