John Smith has a couple of tricks up his sleeve—but don’t worry, he’s not out to deceive us. Quite the opposite: like the anarchic magician who will, in fact, reveal his secrets, first of all he’ll have some fun, and then he’ll let us in on the joke. Smith is clever but not elitist: as much a good socialist as he is one of avant-garde cinema’s finest humorists.

In the 1970s, Smith was an active member of the London Filmmakers’ Cooperative, an artist-run organization dedicated to the moving image, and largely associated at this time with the formalist rigor of so-called structural or materialist film. Alongside these influences, the Walthamstow-born artist was also interested in the potential of narrative and the power of humor. Taking to the streets of London (as well as looking, often, to its skylines), he observes the world with unwavering wit. On top of this, Smith captures a certain kind of East End Englishness that takes pleasure in pubs, puns, and rhymes. Smith ends up finding poetry in all sorts of unexpected places: even in the label on a bottle of laundry liquid.

The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) rightly remains a classic of experimental film: like the later Shepherd’s Delight (1986) and The Black Tower (1987), it playfully and surprisingly undermines the assumed power of the director and the first-person voiceover. Smith’s irreverence toward authority extends to British bureaucracy, as seen in Blight (1996) and Citadel (2021), two takes on the city symphony genre that are heavy not with awe, but with protest. Both rally community spirit. If Smith meddles with our perception, then it is to sharpen our collective critical eye. When Om (1986) and Dad’s Stick (2012) ask us to look and then to look again, Smith is reminding us, ultimately, that what we’re being told might not always be the whole picture.

Telly Savalas

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