John Smith Movies

Super 8 footage of a moving figure (Lis Rhodes), broken down into still frames and reanimated in superimposed layers. Soundtrack by Peter Cusack.

Recorded from a smartphone screen, its translation app running on the wrong settings and struggling to interpret North London street signs in French...

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...

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

Rapid cutting between identically framed portrait photographs creates composite faces and various illusions of movement. The film features...

A film by John Smith and Ian Bourn

Directed by John Smith

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 personal interpretation of the poetry and letters of T S Eliot which explores the ambiguities of language and space in a scenario built around an...

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...

Blue Bathroom is a distillation of ideas concerning the tension between representation and materiality. It begins with an apparently straightforward...

A reworking of material from the 16mm film ‘Blue Bathroom’, a distillation of ideas concerning the tension between representation and...

The only time I’ve visited a communist country was when I went to Poland in 1980, not long after Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative...

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...

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...

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

7P is constructed around the carol The Twelve Days of Christmas and incorporates similar picture and sound fragments recorded over the Christmas...

Celestial Navigation could be seen to work in the tradition of British landscape film in that it incorporates a natural element (the Earths rotation)...

An improvisation recorded over the course of one day, starting at dawn and finishing after dusk. The film was edited in camera and shot from one...