John Smith Movies

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...

“If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.” Matthew 5:38-40

Back stroke butterfly, front crawl and bras, we are awash in an ocean of bubbles. Meanwhile Captain Ahab sets sail on his magic carpet in search of...

Lost Sound documents fragments of discarded audio tape found on the streets of a small area of East London, combining the sound retrieved from each...

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...

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.

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

16mm experimental film of a desk fan.

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.

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...

Many of my films involve humour, but unlike the earlier work Shepherd’s Delight attempts to confront the problem of humour head-on, referring...

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

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

Celestial Navigation could be seen to work in the tradition of British landscape film in that it incorporates a natural element (the Earths rotation)...

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

‘Dungeness’ was originally made for ‘Dungeness: The Desert in the Garden’, a multi-media theatre production directed by...

A film by John Smith and Ian Bourn

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

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...