2 – John Smith, improvising behind the camera

John Smith is an artist filmmaker. After leaving the Royal College of Art in 1977 he became involved in the London Filmmaker’s Co-op, a centre for avant-guard experimentation in the UK. His film The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) involved an apparently simple conceit (that a narrator was directing the events in the street) and showed that it had far reaching consequences for the way we understood cinema. It was also funny. In subsequent films like the Black Tower (1987), Slow Glass (1991) and the Hotel Diaries (2001-2007) he has continued to explore the way film and video reveal the world but are also bound up in conventions. He is a sophisticated and skilled artist, also not afraid of a bad pun.