John Smith Movies

A film by John Smith and Ian Bourn

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.

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

A larger than life tribute to Prince Philip, His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh, recorded in 2002 and completed on the day of his death, April...

A view from a window becomes the locus for a series of visual and verbal descriptions of the past and present.

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

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

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...

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...

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

The perception of an Anglo-American hotel room is coloured by new revelations about ‘The War on Terror’ and ‘The Special...

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...

Hamas have just won the Palestinian elections and a chocolate bar in a Rotterdam hotel room eventually reminds the filmmaker that there are more...

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

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

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...

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

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

Waiting by the sea with his camera ready for action, the artist complains about the weather and attempts to describe his intentions and working...