John Smith Movies

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

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

Lost Sound documents fragments of discarded audio tape found on the streets of a small area of East London, combining the sound retrieved from each...

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

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.

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

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

In the mid 1970s the EMI company were preparing to market the newly developed video disc. Being uncertain as to what content would be appropriate,...

Back stroke butterfly, front crawl and bras, we are awash in an ocean of bubbles. Meanwhile Captain Ahab sets sail on his magic carpet in search of...

Directed by John Smith

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...

16mm experimental film of a desk fan.

A disorientating experience while attempting to watch the TV news in an Irish hotel room triggers a spontaneous response to the bombing of...

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...

Moving from one hotel in Bethlehem to another in East Jerusalem, the filmmaker encounters a series of problems involving a ceiling, a video camera...

'Shine So Hard' is a rare Echo and the Bunnymen promotional concert film, taking place during their 1981 'Camo Tour'.

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...

While the Iraq war continues, a day’s sightseeing and the features of a German hotel provoke a stream of thoughts about events large and small.

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...

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...