Humour has been used and explored by Smith
throughout his career.
While much of his work centres on the fluid
relationship between image and language, it takes different forms. For
example, in Associations, Shepherd's Delight (1980-4) and The Waste Land
(1999), spoken and written words are directly counterpointed with images
for paradoxical or punning effect. Much of this borders on the absurd and
has the manic glee associated with a long literary tradition encompassing
Lewis Carroll (whose intellectualism Smith shares), Hilaire Belloc and the
Dada inspired Marcel Duchamp whose optical-text film has the anagrammatic
title Anemic Cinema (1924). But in The Girl Chewing Gum (1976), The Black
Tower (1985-7) and Slow Glass (1988-91), Smith explores forms of film
narrative, juxtaposing a voice-over with a visual 'narrative'. In his 1986
film Om, he brilliantly uses sounds to confuse the visual track (or is it
the other way around?).
Humour is rarely addressed in film theory even though its outstanding
practitioners have been some of the cinema's great innovators - Buster
Keaton, Luis Bunuel, the Marx Brothers, Jacques Tati - all of whom pushed
or unpicked the logic of the medium itself through humour. Smith stands
fully in this tradition. In The Girl Chewing Gum, the voice-over (assumed
to be that of the director) seems to be guiding every action and
mini-event in what is fairly obviously documentary footage. As the
voice-over barks out 'instructions' to innocent passers-by and even
directs events like pigeons landing on a roof, Smith pays testament to the
overconstruction of mainstream narrative films (extras standing in for
real crowds etc). The result is sublimely funny for its confusion of
directorial omnipotence with our own run-of-the-mill need to control
(which Freud believed was at the centre of art itself).
