Movies: John Smith

A man finds himself haunted by a mysterious black tower in London that appears to follow him wherever he goes....

Being John Smith is a deceptively wry and deeply felt work by the English avant-garde legend, in which Smith reflects on his life and career by way of his generic name, grappling with his own mortality and legacy, through a minimal, unassuming deploy...

'Associations' sets language against itself by using the ambiguities inherent in the English language. Images from magazines and color supplements accompany a voice-over reading from the book 'Word Associations and Linguistic Theory' by academic ling...

Gaza, December 2023. A confrontation with a disturbing photograph on social media triggers questions about what it means to be an onlooker....

At Stamford Road in Dalston Junction of east London, the camera follows pedestrians, cars and birds while a narrator, who appears to be the director behind the camera, seems to instruct the objects....

A short film featuring the voices of those affected when the M11 Link Road in East London was built, accompanied by scenes and sounds of demolition....

Filmed from the artist’s window during the first English lockdown, ‘Citadel’ combines short fragments from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s speeches relating to coronavirus with views of the London skyline....

“London artist John Smith uses light-hearted humour to explore theoretical concerns - Gargantuan, for instance, is both pleasantly silly and acutely conscious of how imagery depends entirely on its framing. A voice-over intones the words ‘huge’ and ‘...

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....

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...

Dad’s Stick features three well-used objects that were shown to the artist by his father shortly before he died. Two of these were so steeped in history that their original forms and functions were almost completely obscured. The third object seemed ...

From the idea that glass, even when cooled, is a liquid that changes in appearance over time, an offscreen narrator launches a recollection of the bygone days of manual glassmaking and an observation of the impact of the mass-produced glass on the ch...

Artist John Smith tells stories about tower block life, editing in bold, unconventional fashion, cutting into the material and highlighting the components and conventions of the film form - yet an intimate portrait of the block's inhabitants still em...

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...

A biblical interpretation of airline safety instructions....

Recorded from a smartphone screen, its translation app running on the wrong settings and struggling to interpret North London street signs in French and convert them to English, Steve Hates Fish turns errors into unintentional poetry....

John Smith stands in front of a mirror, singing “Happy Birthday” in a minor key, like a funeral dirge, twice, as he washes his hands....

A portrait of the artist as a not so young man. The film-maker attempts to enter the digital age by making a new video version of his 1978 film 7P....

‘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....

A film about haircuts, clothes and image/sound relationships. - J.S....