In many ways Smith's subject-matter is one he
seems only comfortable approaching through humour.
It is not a
novel device. There is a rich tradition of British social commentary and
feelings of displacement played through humour (in literature the two
Amis's and Larkin for instance) or grotesque melodrama (Dickens). Slow
Glass's melancholic drift is even supported by a dramatic sequence of a
young boy dressed in 50s clothes, waiting at the window of a suburban
house: a veritable post-war image of loss.
Blight, made with the composer Jocelyn Pook, documents the demolition
of an East London street to make way for the new M11 Link Road. It is an
exquisitely beautiful film of surfaces, textures, movement and colour as
Smith's camera records the dereliction, the detritus of urban demolition.
Pook's textural sound-track incorporates voices ('Come on Kim, come on')
reminiscent of Eliot's pub dialogues in Smith's The Waste Land. A
sublimely droll Smithian moment is the gigantic poster of 'The Exorcist'
revealed on a wall as a building is destroyed, with all its connotations
flowing into the film's own subject-matter. Unlike the complex levels of
Slow Glass, Blight has the static lyrical quality of the earlier British
documentary film movement of the 1930s.
Blight has to be compared with Home Suite as they both cover the same
subject-matter. In the latter film, Smith's new video camera takes a long
look at the house he must leave to make way for the M11 development. This
is an up-close document of the minutiae of his house, beginning
characteristically in the toilet. The filmmaker provides his own wry
desultory commentary and in his longest film, often grappling with the
technical glitches of his video camera (it is thus, at the same time, a
film about the artist coming to grips with a new medium), he offers a
personal reaction to the loss of his home. On viewing Home Suite, Blight
can be seen as the public face of what was at heart a private affair. Made
back to back (Home Suite made first), the two films reveal a tension
between the pristine heavily modulated work he had made up to that date
and a more relaxed, freer way of working that video afforded.
In his essay on John Smith, Ian Bourn compares Home Suite with Smith's
earlier film of his home, Leading Light. They are both about change, with
the difference that the earlier film is structured by the movement of
light in a room, while Home Suite is recorded by a jiggling hand-held
camera whose movement is determined by the film-maker's response to the
topography of his home, which we are finally told by him is about to be
demolished - 'it's the end of an era', he comments. So Smith is a
protagonist in his own story. The collapse of the traditional working
class, the loss of an industrial base, of skills and crafts, of community
is a powerful theme in his work and to this extent Smith himself is bound
up in the inexorable social and historical movement he captures in his
films. It is fascinating to observe the maturing of his work in terms of
emotional resonance, from the cool logic of Associations and conceptually
filtered Leading Light to the complexity of The Black Tower, Slow Glass
and Lost Sound.
In Lost Sound, the sensibility and issues of social perception, humour and
formal rigour which have flowed through his work since A Girl Chewing Gum
have found a further means of expression, again using the interplay of
sound and image. Over some years Smith and Graeme Miller gathered
discarded audio tapes from East London. They found them wrapped around
trees, in mangled knots in gutters, hanging from old railings and so on.
Smith filmed the tape where it was found and Miller took it away to rescue
its sounds, often damaged by weather and urban wear. The result is a
montage of East London tape-locations with their accompanying fragmentary
sounds which range from pub songs to Asian pop. As in many of his other
films people are represented by sound - not voice-overs this time, but the
sounds they use for their pleasure, now lost or discarded. Lost Sound is
another imaginative picture of London and of a new society of fragmented
yet interlocking communities (perhaps this was always the case).
Characteristically, its pathos is gently shot through with humour.
Born and bred in East London, Smith has produced a body of work which is
both an 'objective' and a personal response to urban change. He achieves
this without collapsing into a facile political posturing, or an
omnipotent 'mirroring' or understanding of it. Smith’s world is seen
through a prism of humour, absurdity and easy-going but formally rich
structures. His keen artistic intelligence never allows self-indulgence to
offer cheap balms. Rather, it is through Smith’s fundamental humanism
pervaded by sadness that art comes to offer its restorative power, whilst
always remaining grounded in the world as we experience it.
