John Smith Movies

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

Home Suite, Smith’s first video work, is a close-up journey through a domestic landscape and a journey through memory, containing only three...

Dad’s Stick features three well-used objects that were shown to the artist by his father shortly before he died. Two of these were so steeped...

Abstract animation punctuated by found footage, cut to the song White Light / White Heat by The Velvet Underground.

A film by John Smith and Ian Bourn

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...

‘Covid Messages’ is a video in six parts, based around broadcasts of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s COVID-19 press conferences. The...

In the mid 1970s the EMI company were preparing to market the newly developed video disc. Being uncertain as to what content would be appropriate,...

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

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

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

A view across the border in Nicosia, the divided capital of Cyprus. The camera looks over the rooftops of the Greek Cypriot south to the mountains of...

From the idea that glass, even when cooled, is a liquid that changes in appearance over time, an offscreen narrator launches a recollection of the...

Blue Bathroom is a distillation of ideas concerning the tension between representation and materiality. It begins with an apparently straightforward...

The filmmaker returns to the city where he made the first video in the series [Frozen War] and looks back at the events of the past six years.

An exploration of the ambiguities of documentary photographs which develops ideas triggered by a German pun. Worst Case Scenario starts out as a...

Directed by John Smith

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

A film about haircuts, clothes and image/sound relationships. - J.S.

John Smith stands in front of a mirror, singing “Happy Birthday” in a minor key, like a funeral dirge, twice, as he washes his hands.