Short of the Week: A hilarious meta-documentary by John Smith
John Smith is among the many notable avant-garde British filmmakers who incorporated English humour into their experimental investigations. Through his cinema, Smith has routinely probed the boundaries of the cinematic medium and has toyed with voyeuristic expectations to create moments of pure brilliance.
Associated with the London Filmmakers’ Co-op, Smith drew inspiration from structural materialism and contemporary conceptual art, which broadened his vision of cinema. The primary motif that dominates many of Smith’s experiments is the constant conflict between fiction and reality which sustains the illusion of the images on the screen.
For this week’s edition of Short of the Week, we have decided to highlight Smith’s seminal 1976 short The Girl Chewing Gum. Inspired by a scene from François Truffaut’s masterpiece Day for Night, it involves a setup where we see daily activities, but it seems like reality within the frame is guided by the barked commands of a director offscreen.
In an interview, Smith said: “When I first made the film, on more than one occasion when I showed it, someone in the audience would get very upset about it. A few people who came from Northern Ireland expressed concerns, where there was an awful lot of British surveillance of people’s daily lives going on at that time. But I think the viewer is very aware that anything that is said about the people in the film or the way in which they are being shown is a construct.”
He added, “Because I am so obviously fictionalising what is going on in the film, I have no moral qualms about it. I think it’s much more problematic when films purport to be documentaries, where we are told what somebody did or what somebody thinks, but it is still not a very accurate representation of that person’s thoughts or actions. In a way, The Girl Chewing Gum is more honest in its manipulation.”
With every passing second, the directions become more bizarre as the filmmaker desperately tries to assert his authority on the chaos of everyday life. It’s a hilarious critique of cinema’s perverted sense of realism, evident in Smith’s attempts to order pigeons where to go and to restructure reality to please the gaze of the camera.
Watch the short film below.
