John Smith began making films in the early
1970s.
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He graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1977 as one
of a younger generation of avant-garde filmmakers and became strongly
associated with the London Film-makers' Co-op, which had emerged in the
1960s and had become the centre for artists' filmmaking in England. He had
made eight films before making Associations (1975), a witty visual
rendition of psychological word-play. In the same year he made Leading
Light, a film recording light changes in his room over a day and revealing
the 'irregular beauty of a familiar space'.
These two early films express two different impulses which run
throughout his work. On the one hand, Associations is a highly structured,
hermetic work in which an academic voice reads an excerpt from a book on
linguistic theory, discussing how people associate words with other words.
Smith sets ups his own humorous parallel associations, using images to
stand in for words, and sometimes the syllables of words, uttered by the
speaker. The images are banal ones, taken from colour supplements and
popular magazines. The film comprises black leader with bursts of images
appearing in clusters. For example, the utterance 'associations' is
represented by images of an ASS, a SEWing machine, the SEA and a group of
ASIANS. More obliquely, the image of a judge accompanies the utterance
'sentences'. It is a film of semantic wit, word-play and visual punning.
On the other hand, Leading Light is a 'document' of Smith's immediate
world, sieved through the structuring devices of location, time and light.
It is a study of light as it moves through a lived-in attic room over the
course of a day. At a certain point a folk-song is heard on the
soundtrack, apparently coming from the record player we see in the room.
In its time, it was a film that fitted in with some of the experiments of
such contemporary filmmakers as William Raban (Angles of Incidence) and
Peter Gidal (Hall) who often used domestic space as a subject matter for
exploring film-structuring devices. However in Smith's film there is also
a sense of reverie, of a personality who occupies the room and of an
attempt to capture some fleeting quality. Viewed nearly thirty years
after, it has a sense of loss and of sadness. While Associations and
Leading Light are fairly pure examples of respectively semantic wit and of
documentary, his other films often combine both qualities.
