Tag: John Smith

John Smith – ‘Playing with the Power of Language’

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John Smith is an artist filmmaker. He began making films when he was 18, at a time when ‘people were wanting to make work which was in opposition to mainstream cinema and particularly undermine the illusionism of cinema, and were reminded in whatever way that you were watching a film.’

 

The Girl Chewing Gum (1976)

He simply recorded what was going on in the street and then wrote a script which added voice-over directions to the film. I appears as if the actions you see in the film are being directed by an unseen film director.

  • ‘A film like The Girl Chewing Gum is in one way fitting into the ideas of that time. But it’s also playing with the power of language to condition how we actually see images, and that has a kind of humorous outcome…although it is a very, very serious film.’
  • ‘When I am editing, in my head I’ve got two parallel things going on, one is the image and one is the sound.’
  • ‘The dynamics of the film come from that relationship between image and sound, how one can be dominant at one point and one can be dominant at another…It’s completely intuitive. It’s just to do with how it feels, those balances between different things.’

Hotel Diaries (2001-07)

He was eager to take on the possibilities of the spontaneity of using handheld video cameras. Something that had not been possible when working with film.

The six year series of videos came about by accident while in Ireland for the Cork Film Festival. Britain and the US had just started bombing Afghanistan. He switched on the TV in his hotel room to find the image had frozen

  • ‘something which was possibly just a technical glitch was actually…I was finding traumatic…in my head I was thinking just how different my reality was from the innocent people in Afghanistan who were having bombs dropped on their heads.’
  • ‘having these contradictory things going in my head, I just got my camera out and just filmed the TV screen and had this stream of consciousness.’
  • ‘I really wanted to make work that looks like anybody can do it. I thought if I can make something which looks like a home video and I just forced myself to actually not edit it at all, so I’m going to say stupid things that I’m going to regret, I’m going to mess things up, and stuff like that, this should undermine any kind of potential didacticism.’
  • ‘and the work kind of intended to be conversational on an equal level with the audience, so like a lot of my work really, those videos were saying I’m bothered about this, what do you think?’

Dad’s Stick (2012)

His father showed him a cross-section of a stick he used to paint the house with, so you could all the different layers of paint.

  • ‘I found it really poignant. In a sense I felt like there was a whole history, an important part of someone’s life, that were encapsulated in this tiny little object.’
  • ‘When I put the stick in front of a magnifying lens, it become even more poignant for me, because I realised I was looking at colour that I remembered from fifty years ago.’

In recent years, his work has become shorter.

‘I like to think that I’m sort of distilling things down, that I’m making haikus now. But it might just be that I haven’t got the energy…’

 

List of references

TateShots (2018) ‘John Smith – Playing With the Power of Language’ At:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CciUtECXXNk (Accessed on 15 October 2018)

Screening: ‘Out of Body’ – Irish Film Institute, Tuesday 25th July

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Last night I attended a screening of nine experimental films from 1943 to the present day at the Irish Film Institute in Dublin. Curated by Irish artist and filmmaker Susan MacWilliam in response to the exhibition As Above, So Below: Portals, Visions, Spirits & Mystics currently showing at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Out of Body presented a selection of films that explore the psychic and physical spaces of body and landscape.

The theme of ‘physical spaces of body and landscape’ is of interest to my own practice as a filmmaker, particularly in light of my first two assignment films ‘Blue Jacket’ and ‘Ataraxis’, in which I was exploring ideas of person and place, though not as effectively.

The nine films screened, of which only Maya Deren and John Smith were names with which I was familiar, were:

Psychic Edit, Susan MacWilliam, 2008, Ireland, DCP, 14 second looped

Witch’s Cradle Outtakes, Maya Deren, 1943, USA, Digibeta, 10 minutes

State of Mind, remix #4, Mairéad McClean, 2005, Ireland, DVD, 10 minutes

Faint, Susan MacWilliam, 1999, Ireland, DCP, 4 minutes

The Black Sea, Jordan Baseman, 2010, USA/UK, Blu-ray, 3 minutes

Mountain Mist, Susan MacWilliam, 2002, Ireland, DCP, 8 minutes

Om, John Smith, 1988, UK, 16mm, 4 minutes

Ray Gun Virus, Paul Sharits, 1966, USA, 16mm, 14 minutes

The Last Person, Susan MacWilliam, 1998, Ireland, DCP, 11 minutes

Although the ‘psychic’ aspect of the theme of last night’s screening doesn’t resonate with me as a filmmaker, the nine films were excellent examples of experimental moving image practice between the 1940s and today. Using a variety of techniques, the films challenge our perception of the physical body and physical place/landscape.

One particularly interesting technique that figures in many of the films is the use of repetition and pattern. For example, the 14 second looped Psychic Edit (MacWilliams, 2008) establishes a pattern of images that repeats over time, building into a repeated extended sequence of family footage and a woman’s smile; a female figure repeatedly fainting beneath a tree in Faint (MacWilliams, 1999) establishes a pattern of movement and action that builds into a mesmeric, trance-like sequence; the single-shot of moving waves in The Black Sea (Baseman, 2010) generates its own graphic repetitions and patterns which, over time, appear to take on the appearance of a living, breathing form; and, by contrast, the highly charged sense of pattern and repetition that is established in Ray Gun Virus (Sharitts, 1966) exerts a strange hold over the viewer in a trance-like retinal experience that seems to engage with your own body in a way that none of the other films do.

In Mountain Mist (MacWilliams, 2002) the use of time and space plays a key role in the film’s structure and form. In a single-shot, in which the camera is locked down on a view of a mountain side covered in trees, space remains constant throughout, while time is manipulated through the use of time-lapse. We see birds flying, mists dispersing and rain storms passing in real-time, intercut with changes in the landscape such as clouds passing, fluctuations in light, and a sunset, in time-lapse.

Some of the films have no sound attached to them at all, such as Witch’s Cradle Outtakes (Deren, 1943) and The Last Person (MacWilliam, 1998). As a result, the absence of sound places all the emphasis on the visual experience of watching the movement and action within these two films. Even to the point that you become more acutely aware of the sound of your own body in the silence of the room.

To see these nine films in their original formats as they were intended to be viewed on the cinema screen was a real treat. Particularly, the 16mm prints of John Smith’s Om (1988) and Paul Sharits’ Ray Gun Virus (1966), which I now realise is a rare privilege.

This screening has left me with plenty of food for thought. Once again, as with my discovery of Vivienne Dick’s work a couple of weeks ago, a whole world of moving image practice has opened up for me.

References

As Above, So Below: Portals, Visions, Spirits & Mystics, Exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, 13 April – 27 August 2017

Faint (1999) MacWilliam, S. http://www.susanmacwilliam.com/faint (Accessed on 26 July 2017)

Psychic Edit (2008) MacWilliam, S. http://www.susanmacwilliam.com/psychic-edit (Accessed on 26 July 2017)

The Black Sea (2010) Baseman, J. http://www.jordanbaseman.co.uk/the-black-sea (Accessed on 26 July 2017)

Ray Gun Virus (1966) Sharits, P. https://vimeo.com/17173209 (Accessed on 26 July 2017)

Dad’s Stick (2012), John Smith

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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 to be instantly recognizable, but it turned out to be something else entirely. Focusing on these ambiguous artifacts and events relating to their history, Dad’s Stick creates a dialogue between abstraction and literal meaning, exploring the contradictions of memory to hint at the character of “a perfectionist with a steady hand” (John Smith).

My tutor suggested I look at ‘Dad’s Stick’ by John Smith.

‘Dad’s Stick’ is a tribute to the artist’s father. It opens with what appears to be an abstract multicoloured image of colours layered like stratified rock. It is then superimposed by the text: ‘My dad did a lot of painting.’ In the background we can hear the sound of knocking; wood on wood, maybe. The film goes silent for a few seconds as see some more frames of the abstract multicoloured layers, superimposed with texts. Then we cut to a series of plain coloured frames (beige, green, brown, off-white, black) superimposed with further captions, starting with ‘Dad’s colour preferences changed over the years.’ Eventually, we cut to an image of a stick, superimposed with the text ‘Shortly before he died he showed me one of the sticks that he used for stirring paint.’ It’s at this point we realise that we are looking something completely different; the cross-section of his father’s painting stick. It’s a wonderful moment.

Smith’s ‘Dad’s Stick’ is a delightful film. It’s a playful game with images, words and meanings. What at first seems like an abstract painting is in fact the cross-section of a wooden stick his father used to mix household paint before applying it to the walls of his house. What appeared to be an abstract multicoloured image is in fact the layers of paint that became encrusted on the stick over decades of painting the house. Our expectations are completely overturned by the insertion of one image, the stick.

What I like about this film is its simplicity. There are only a handful of static shots, a few superimposed captions, a couple of sound effects of knocking on wood and stirring in a teacup, and the artist’s voice in the background, singing. Yet, it’s within so few images and sounds that our perceptions are challenged and, more importantly, we are drawn into the film space and asked to recall memories of our own parents.

As I was watching the film it got me thinking about my own father and an item that once belonged to him; his large, brown tape measure, that travelled all over Cheshire with him whenever he went on site as a Cheshire County Council architect.

References

‘Dad’s Stick’ (2012), Smith, J. At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rx2hPQ2S08k (Accessed on: 6 April 2017)

Smith, J. ‘Dad’s Stick’ At: johnsmithfilms.com/selected-works/dads-stick/ (Accessed on: 11 April 2017)

Exercise 3: Conceptual and thematic ideas

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In this exercise I made notes on two ideas to see how far they could be pushed in a conceptual way.

In preparation for this, I looked at two very different short films, Matt White’s Weightless (2008) and Helen Rosemier’s Getting Up (2014).

Weightless takes as its theme the artist’s own shifting state of mind through self-hypnosis. Filmed in one continuous shot, we see his facial expression change along with his state of mind, as he gazes through a window.

Getting Up adopts a more narrative approach in its depiction of domestic life for a man with a wheelchair. Filmed in a linear sequence of shots, we see the artist’s husband as he wakes, showers, dresses and leaves the house in the morning.

Both films take an idea and develop it conceptually through very different cinematic techniques.

One approach I would like to try is using some of the techniques of abstract and associational form outlined in Film Art (Bordwell & Thompson, 2017). However, taking an abstract, poetic approach to filmmaking is not something I have thought about or even attempted to do until starting this course.

I found Matt White’s approach to developing ideas for abstract and conceptual films particularly useful. His ideas ‘start with or evolve into seemingly simple and apparently pointless goals’ and lead on to the ‘collection of data (video, photographs, audio recordings, figures, documents) that are further developed into art works’ (White, 2017:28).

 

 

The idea of starting from an ‘apparently pointless’ goal and then going on to collect data was quite liberating for me. I took the idea about the colour blue from the previous exercise and came up with the ‘apparently pointless’ goal of wanting to know how blue the sky is, in the hope that it would raise questions I could go on to experiment with through the moving image. My initial notes included ideas about how we perceive colour, the physics behind our understanding of the earth’s atmosphere and how the ‘heavens’ have been perceived throughout history.

Rather than creating a film that presents a plot, I would create a film that follows a conceptual journey, in which it presents a series of images that will have an effect on the viewer. In a similar way to John Smith’s approach in his film Horizon (2012), in which each shot is a literal representation of the sea at the moment at which it was filmed.  To the viewer, John Smith’s Horizon (2012) could be seen as a documentary presenting the Margate seascape as it changes over a three month period, or it could be seen in terms of colour, composition, light and contrast.

 

References

Bordwell, D., & Thompson, K. (2017) Film Art: An Introduction, 11th edition. New York: McGraw Hill

Moving Image 1: Setting the Scene (2017). Barnsley: Open College of the Arts.

John Smith on Horizon (2012) Mark Castro & Max Philo. At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLjRk_EHI6k (Accessed on: 27 March 2017)